In case you didn't notice, it has already been more than a year since the very viral "Studio Ghibli" trend came out of ChatGPT's image-gen updates. It was something that the world had never seen before. Even Sam Altman, the CEO, was shocked to see such a response, to which he had to say this:

As someone who loved playing with (and jailbreaking) AI models since the GPT-3 days, I was pretty excited about generating Studio Ghibli images myself. Like many other thrifty Free users of ChatGPT, who’ll create 10 accounts but won’t pay for a single one of them, I remember being utterly disappointed. I couldn’t use any of the ten accounts to generate a single such image because there were too many people doing the same. Indian internet consumers are probably the second biggest reason why rate limits exist. The first? Their AI agents!

On the flip side, we had people who were angry about this trend, including the man behind Studio Ghibli itself — Hayao Miyazaki.

To them, this was clearly a breach of IP (which it was) and a stale attempt at copying something users didn’t really understand, and obviously something which was getting made all too conveniently. The slop factory was real and ChatGPT’s business was booming. Those on the other side of the ring put up lawsuits, conducted petitions and protests, and did everything they could to stop any further developments on Artificial Intelligence as a branch of study. A month ago, Molotov cocktails were thrown at Sam Altman’s home in the middle of the night. Telling that you work in tech attracts more side-eyes these days than phone numbers at house parties.

If you didn’t notice yet, everything on the web these days seems AI-generated. Which might not even be that far from the truth. A study from Ahrefs in March 2025 showed that 3 out of 4 webpages on the internet now have at least some AI-generated content. And this was before Claude Code was public and OpenClaw wasn’t really a concept! Imagine this ratio today.

However, there’s another angle to this debate, which plays to people’s inherently tribal brains.

Richard Nadler, a German artist, faced immediate backlash on his work as soon as people learned that he’s a “generative AI artist”. All of a sudden, the work which seemed so surreal and beautiful, became a bunch of crap and AI-generated fluff that people were not ready to engage with at all.

Anything these days created with the help of AI, even remotely so, is dismissed as slop without any further discussion.

A sloppy and convenient statement hidden behind a guise of intellectualism, oh the irony! If AI is the culprit behind slop, and curtailing its use is what leads to “original ideas”, does it sound fair that no slop existed on the internet before ChatGPT existed?

Are you really sure about that?

Let’s look at the definition of slop as per the Cambridge dictionary.

And mind you this has been a word which has been around well before AI was a buzzword. Although, the word’s been more in use recently for very obvious reasons.

It’s safe to say that slop was indeed a thing before ChatGPT came out. The volume of production of slop, however, is accelerated a lot more as it becomes easy to make things which are based off some other thing that someone saw on the internet.

But what makes slop so sloppy?

In early 2025, my little brother Akshit also published his post on AI slop and how the absence of friction of creating something worthwhile robs it off its greatness. He’s inconsistent but he’s a far more entertaining writer than I could ever be. Check it out!

Akshit’s Substack

The Great Ghiblification Gambit – How AI Art Will Smother Creativity in Its Sleep

Well now, this isn’t exactly the sort of topic that breeds controversy. No torch-waving mobs have assembled (yet) in defense of AI-generated art, no solemn declarations of war from the Grand Guild of Prompt Engineers. Most people, however, will be thoroughly irritated by an article headlined in this manner…

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a year ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · Akshit Sahu

But the point he makes in his essay is essentially what I want to project. Which is: anything that hits like free dopamine but is born without the inherent struggle of being an artist, is what’s slop. What lacks effort, clearly shows lacking effort.

The nuance I’d like to add that is that sloppiness is not a debate of whether or not AI was used in the production of that artefact. It’s more to do with the level of attention given at the time of production, at the time of consumption and the real intent behind creating the said artefact (which is usually appeasing the algorithm gods).

It’s indeed true that AI models are getting better and sharper at following your direction — whatever and how noble it may be, and for very long periods of time. With some configuration they’re able to generate 1:1 clones of websites (nowadays even APIs) but they inherently lack a sense of direction.

It’s funny to say that it takes a hell lot of time to produce anything meaningful beyond the clone from AI. If you’re someone serious about your work, and you think you’re good at what you do, you’ll feel the urge of not involving AI into your work when you start out, or at least critiquing what AI has generated pretty harshly. That’s why it takes so long to get to the right answer with AI, a good one takes two sentences and a minute.

If you haven’t already noticed, all “knowledge work” is a byproduct of two aspects:

• your ideas (original or inspired)

• the mundane steps of getting there

Someone may argue that the mindless mundanity of bringing your ideas to life is “inefficient” and therefore should be weeded out. But sometimes these steps give you the necessary friction to keep at it and produce more original work. I still prefer sketching out first ideas on paper for my posts and designers still use Figma even if they can now code.

On the flipside, there are also some things that are notoriously mundane, such as writing boilerplate code for a Next.js app, wetting your canvas before you paint or sound checks on stage which can run upto several hours at a time. Sometimes your creative endeavour of getting to a place with your art is lost on you as a result of this “boring” process. As a result the floor of production is already so damn high that a lot of people with amazing app ideas may not build them, or the rapper with a beat in her head may never be able to get it out into the world.

That’s where AI is helping people. It’s helping them to at least get started, and get their production to a level that helps people be less embarrassed about their first drafts.

But is building things using AI akin to life on easy mode? I beg to differ.

Now that everyone’s able to build a solid v0 of their idea, it’s taking so much more from artists to raise the bar to a degree where AI can’t even judge them probably, let alone help them create. The ceiling is rising to abnormally high levels. New records, new apps, new visualizations — so much fun!

Artists like Nadler are embracing these new tools with open arms and are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in digital art. When asked about his process of creating his beautiful visualizations, here's what he had to say:

tl;dr

He starts from personal memories and hand-drawn sketches, then feeds them into a custom AI model he co-trained with a technical collaborator. He then iterates daily for months (new prompts, new reference images, fine-tuning), generating thousands of outputs through trial and error, before curating down to ~128 final pieces with help from platform curators.

You tell me — does that look like slop to you?

There was a time when electronic artists who relied on sampling from existing tracks and mixing over them, were considered indecent. Heck, I don’t have to go that far, even I thought that it was cheap and unoriginal to take an existing track and mix it up. When my friend introduced me to Kanye West, I scorned at his work (oh wow I so hate myself).

But then, he showed me a video of breaking down his sample, I was impressed. I also learned that Linkin Park were genius samplers, most notably, the intro from Faint was lifted and shifted from the James Bond franchise’s From Russia with Love. I was floored.

As someone who started exploring these tools for production, I was genuinely amazed and relieved that human creativity can breed anywhere if given enough space and the right constraints. The bar keeps getting higher.

Could we have seen Kanye without sampling? Could we have had Charlie Puth and Jacob Collier and Billie Eilish and FINNEAS producing banger albums from their bedrooms and winning Grammies? Could we have seen artists like Nadler sharing their beautiful work without AI? OF COURSE NOT.

My entire argument is - slop is sloppy just like water is wet. The models may get better at producing one-shot outputs, which just means that more people will be able to do the same. What you make on the first pass will almost always not stand out, which means that you’re at your baseline and there’s only one way to go. The tech always raises the floor but pushes the ceiling even higher.

The tools that you see around you: be it coding agents, design tools or research assistants are still pretty novel and are as bad as they’ll ever be. As the tech matures (which is going to at least take 5-10 years as we understand modalities and best human-computer interfaces for the new era), we’ll see new frontiers getting unlocked. We don’t even know what’s possible and what kind of advancements we’ll make in critical domains like medical research and nuclear physics.

Tigerfeathers

Dognosis: Unleashing Canine Superpowers

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a month ago · 42 likes · 18 comments · Rahul Sanghi

But as of now, technology, as it has been all this while, the great equalizer. Love it or hate it, more people will now have access to do things which only experts could. That may mean that some “experts” will no longer be needed in places where they were needed before, but the bar for the top 10% in any field has gone up higher than ever. The experts who can argue about machine output confidently need more command on their craft, and the value on their craft has gone up by about a 100x of what it was before. The average man often doesn’t need their expert advice in a simple hobby project, but the man can aspire to get to a standard which is at least 50% of what his masters did. Which is all that matters.

Yes, the models always produced sloppy output until a while back. Will Smith wasn’t able to get his ramen into his mouth for quite a few years. But if you’ve been following the developments that Higgsfield AI have been making in film production, you’d need to lift your jaw up from the floor.

The entire deal is this: computers, for the first time in human history, killed the effort that it took to produce multiple copies of the same digital file by being able to replicate it for an infinite number of times, helping creators around the world build so much good stuff and still earn a living off it. The new tools at our disposal now make it easy to replicate ideas, workflows, constraints, and remix them into artefacts which look ever-so slightly different and more “customized” to a particular situation.

The ways of working you build give compounded returns. But the foundations are still the same: for you to be able to produce anything worth producing, you need to have the depth of knowledge in the domain you’re labelling yourself an expert. Being a “shallow master” will not cut it anymore.

The economic value still lies in the deterministic part in the production of anything AI generated. Models in of themselves are quickly becoming a commodity. That’s also the reason why we see OpenAI and Anthropic rushing to grab businesses by first starting with Forward-Deployed Engineers and now moving to full-blown services. Are they trying to be the new TCS?

As for slop production, yes, that’s still a problem. But that’s more because our existing social media paradigms are not attuned to the new reality of someone being able to “crack the algorithm” once and then repeating it a thousand times for financial gains.

The playbook to going viral is now contained in a cron job. Use the same template that has made you successful and publish posts on a schedule. Not bad for someone who’d like to be famous on the internet, no? The rules for engagement-baiting as defined by social media platforms are the very incentive behind the generation of slop. If slop wasn’t commerically successful, we wouldn’t have seen any of it, even before AI was around in its current shape and form.

To wrap it all up, and I’ll say it again: slop is a problem. It always has been. But to make AI the culprit instead of questioning why people would be interesting in generating slop in the first place (in the hopes of pleasing yet another AI overlord) is where we lose the plot.

We’ve already started putting AI to good use in medicine, research and helping people who were limited by their skill in web development to build cool apps. Yes, v0 has become easier to manufacture but it’s just that: the first cut. Good if you’re happy with it. But getting to a level where you can produce marvels from the new technology takes as much time, if not more.

With that said...

Cheers,
Samyak

Note: AI was only used for research on this post. I intend to keep it that way, idk for how long…

07:23 hrs

My day started a little earlier than usual. Let’s go! I’ll most certainly nail it this time. After all, I’ve kept a note of what to do and what not to do from the previous week, and month, and a few months before it. I don’t really know what happened to the last year’s note.

The day started well. I got a head start. Did I tell you that I woke up earlier than usual? Well there was something I did in between which I don’t clearly remember anymore, that led me to getting ready only by my usual time. All that I remember is a slurry of notifications, texts, emails and deadlines the moment I rubbed my eyes and peeked at my phone as I was taking the morning dump.

Okay, I’m ready to own this day. I’m ready to cross off the first three high-priority items from my to-do list. But for some reason I don’t feel like it. I feel hollow. I already feel tired. I haven’t even started!

I panic. I remember my biology lessons from school. Adrenaline leads to three kinds of responses – fight, flight, freeze.

I’m frozen – by exhaustion, indecision. By the exhaustion of not being able to take any firm decisions. The only “quick fix” I see to this is to get validation for how I feel through relatable memes on Instagram or “yes, you’re absolutely right”-type messages by ChatGPT.

I look back up at the clock. I’m sure I’ve seen it more times, but still this time feels like my second since I woke up. It’s 2:30 pm already! What am I even doing? There’s so much cringe content on my feed today, I hate it. Someone’s marriage, someone’s trip – none of whom I’ve talked to in the last 5 years. Why am I still watching it? Sure this day has gone to waste. There’s nothing I could do about it now. What’s worst? It’s 2:32 pm already. Which only means one thing – it’s ‘chill time’ as per my calendar. The day’s more than half-spoilt, what’s even the point of recovering what remains?

My afternoon doomscrolling session leaves me angry – about the state of the world and my own. I can only feel my blood boiling at the recent story she posted with her new BF (who’ll tell me she was single for sometime?! wdym to say that I never had a chance?) . But I have no energy to fight back, to do anything about it. Not my fortune, not my cookie. Fortune cookies are fake anyway.

Only now do I think that minimizing losses was probably a better idea than YOLO-ing the day. I’m losing my mind not as pixie dust, but in big crumbs. Crumbs... she didn’t leave no crumbs behind. She’s another she BTW. Who cares? There are bigger things to do. I’m not even doing anything about them, though.

If I can’t fix the day, let me do something that doesn’t make me feel too bad about it. Ek kaam karta hoon, so jaata hoon. The sunset signalling the end of the day will feel kinda depressing, let’s avoid it altogether. Modern problems require modern solutions.

Right before sleeping I was angry, which soon turned into grave disappointment when I realized I was already through 1352 weeks of my life, and if I live up to 80 (which could be way off), I have some 2823 weeks more, all thanks to this widget that I found online. Someone on X also mentioned that 24 is basically half of your life done, as your perception of time keeps accelerating as you grow older. This put me in a state of dismissive panic, I dusted it off my shoulders and submitted myself to my soft bed.

I woke up to the cacophony of dogs in the park and their multifarious tongues... wait what!? Where have I heard that? Oh yes, that was the video that I was watching before I felt asleep. I feel fresh after waking up though, let me save the little that the day has for me.

My brain felt much slower, in a good way. I was able to notice my stream of consciousness. Maybe some rest is what I needed. Maybe bingeing on that new season of The Boys with the boys over Discord on sips of beer wasn’t a good idea after all. Maybe I’m just too fragile and not cut for what’s “normal”.

I prop up on my bed and pick up an old diary collecting dust on my shelf. I didn’t notice it for a very long time. I crack it open to see some of my old poems that won me competitions. There were some better ones that didn’t meet anyone but me, I felt too awkward sharing them out in the public. Bowing to the recent 2016 trend, I looked at a poem and thought back to myself:

Will the kid in me be proud of what he’s become after 10 years?

It doesn’t feel like that in the moment, but I’ve sure done some objectively good things. Getting through one of the best engineering colleges of the country, challenging my introversion and making true friends, getting into a job people usually dream of, secretly plotting to get out of it to pursue even bigger dreams. To the outside world, I seem like a “sorted” guy. Maybe the others who look as sorted to me are just better hiding the whirlpool that’s their mind?

I opened my journal and started writing...

…

After all, I *know* what's exactly been up with my mind. The surprise-evoking neurotransmitters (dopamine/noradrenaline) numb my brain and my energy is constantly squeezed out of my body like ketchup from an empty plastic bottle. Submitting myself to the little multicoloured LEDs covered by a pane of glass, especially late in the night puts in a state of wakefulness. I've (unknowingly) engineered my surroundings to remain wakeful and confused, such that I remain dazed and confused when I'm actually needed by the world.

I make up for my lack of socialization by being active in Reddit communities and Instagram accounts of unknown faces and intents. The neurotransmitters responsible for the feeling of belongingness (oxytocin) hold onto their chances of going all out at that one person who disagreed with my *kind* in the comment section of that reel. Connection without connection.

What is it if it's not a self-inflicting wound - something that gets widened before its healed? How can I complain about the noise when I simply expect to hear some music by just turning up the volume? The worst part is, however, that the mind is bad at reading itself. For it to be able to do that, it needs to turn off any external stimulation.

For we don’t rise up to the levels of our expectations, we fall back to the levels of our systems (Adam Grant). The problem is that our expectations from ourselves are inflated while our systems are breaking apart - all thanks to this little pandora box of distraction. Could we not do something about it?

…

All that and a lot more thoughts (about the future of politics in this country and the ‘crumbs’ ofc), and it’s 2:30 am already. Hey, at least I feel ready for what lies ahead of me for the day, even if there’s no time left. I submit to doomscrolling and responding to the texts of my friends as we relate to the sad-boi hour reels and there’s yet another day, just like this one, waiting for me on the other side.

My younger self would be so proud of me, one day for sure...

That was my most ADHD-pilled post on this Substack (till date) and was quite fun to write!

Thanks for making it all the way to the end. This essay was written as part of a collaborative exercise with fellow writers in the Delhi NCR Substack group.

Here are some others (which are much more coherent) you should definitely check out!

1. … and how I slowly learned to quiet it within by

2. One that refuses to leave and the one I invited in by

3. What does ‘Synthesis’ even mean? by

4. Treasoned Hero by

5. Noise by

• This was our first month of ops at Masala Dew. The original vision suddenly not only seems achievable, but inevitable. If not us, someone else would go on and do it.

• When I said “we/us” whenever I mentioned what’s happening at our company this month, I meant me and my agents. And no, I don’t feel weird about it at all.

• Increasingly getting happier about my decision to move out of Bangalore and avoid the doomerism encapsulating the tech world. We’re living in a wonderful country: so many unsolved problems and opportunities that lie outside of the blr/sf tech bubble.

• Frontier labs are hyperfocussed on developer tooling, which is good news to anyone who’s building outside of that market. A quick stroll through the markets of Delhi will tell you that there’s SO much more to be built

• Shitty models work like shit even on good harnesses. Good models work amazing on excellent harnesses. It’s often better to spend more on SOTA models than to waste time weeping over crap produced by a “cost-effective” configuration.

• Everything’s about writing text files and executing them - which is why frontier labs are hellbent on getting it right. But new capability only makes new businesses possible, it doesn’t automatically make them happen.

• I went (really) deep into the rabbithole of new AI tools this month, dug through almost every kind of hot new thing that has come in the market - upgraded to a Claude Max subscription and got converted to a Paper Pro user within the first two days of using it. My wallet’s weeping rn

• Our goal for this month was to develop that “execution muscle” and try out the breadth of tools that exist to ship. But you don’t always need the perfect tool for every little thing - some of the most productive people are building stuff out of copy-pasting stuff from ChatGPT.

• That being said, well-crafted tools do help. Both in getting stuff done faster, and also in giving inspiration on what’s possible to build now. There’s a delicate balance here.

• Open source is showing a lot of promise, it may soon become one of the best ways to generate distribution on products, esp tools used by passionate builders

• Still been procrastinating for stupid reasons; not being able to install Linux made me procrastinate on setting up OpenClaw. Old habits die hard.

• Quite inspired to see a lot of my friends starting up or on the fence about it: someone’s gotta create all the lost jobs, and so many more!

• There are a lot of things to work on for the coming month - legal entity, tighter org structure, getting closer to our go-live date. Not being too hard on myself as we’re in the middle of a seismic shift on how software gets shipped and distributed, and still personally adjusting to the cadence of working nights and weekends after being in a traditional corporate structure for so long

• aur kya kya karwaoge iss nanhi si jaan se?

Stealing this idea from ’s post on Riffle Studio. In my defense I had thought of it earlier but missed doing it several times. There’s a world of difference between thinking about something and actually doing it. That may just be the key takeaway of this post :)

I love to read, but I’m one of those guys who’d catalog any book whose cover looks interesting, or is recommended by someone I admire, on Goodreads (lately Fable) and never look back at it again.

And instead of solving that problem (by perhaps cataloging less and reading more), I decided to make it worse by building such a book catalog for myself over Obsidian. Maybe there’d be a threshold on the number of to-read books that will then push me towards actually reading them? Who knows...

And why Obsidian? Oh boy, I’m having so much fun using it lately. I’ll speak more to it later.

My approach to this was to build an Obsidian Base (basically a database of sorts) and make it look like a library where I can add reviews, other related artefacts and use the absurd number of CLI tools to do other fun things.

Here’s how I did it - it took me < 20 mins to be set up with everything, most of which were spent fixing a nasty bug around displaying book covers.

Some background before we start

I wanted to push Claude Code to the limit. So instead of giving it step-by-step instructions and proper context files across a project (as I’d normally do for a small coding project), I felt ambitious and decided to one-shot it.

I spun up Claude Code on my terminal and decided to build this base without even touching the Obsidian app.

The pre-requisites for this project were:

• Claude Code (Pro subscription is more than sufficient for this)

• Obsidian CLI

• Obsidian Sync (which is a paid subscription but there are also free-but-less-convenient ways of doing it) + app on Android

Essentially the Obsidian CLI allows Claude Code to understand what Obsidian is and how to use it autonomously.

CLIs or Command-Line Interfaces, allow the user (human/AI agent) to send instructions to an app directly. They’re taking over as the de-facto way to interact with any app (local/cloud-hosted) as Claude Code can do anything you can do by directly talking to the app in the terminal over a CLI.

The first CLIs appeared in the 1970s as a way to send instructions to the computer, before interactive GUIs were even a thing. This reminded me of this Substack Note that I made a long time back.

I won’t go into much detail about the setup process, you may look into the docs or ask Claude Code for instructions if you’ve been feeling lazy about it.

Here’s how it went

Since I had all the tools I need, I felt confident to use a single prompt and be done building the library.

Also, knowing that we’d need to fetch a lot of assets from the web for this, and to ensure that we have a context window large enough to accomodate all of that information, I decided to go ahead with the Claude Opus 4.6 model for this task. This was atypical of me as I typically use Sonnet (and sometimes even Haiku) for most of my tasks to save costs.

Here’s the exact prompt that I used:

Note that there’s none of that “imagine you’re a world class developer” kind of a crap. With the AI models getting so good, they can take offense at you telling them who they are.

(urghhh, well...)

I’m glad I used Opus for it, because even though the script logic was not too long, and Sonnet would be easily able to handle this stuff, but there were about 94 links and I wanted accurate reproduction of all the links in the Python script that Claude Code would use.

So if you know that there are going to be a lot of lines of code getting written for a single task (in this case, Claude simply pushed the 100+ line Python script directly into bash), it’s better to go with one of the larger models at your disposal to minimize risk of hallucinate/typos that smaller models tend to make more of.

In the first go, this is what I got:

Hmm we’re almost there but something seems off... Where are the book covers? When I clicked on one of the book listings, I could see the cover but it was not appearing properly here.

But my lazy bum didn’t want to find out the issue, and instead used Claude Haiku 4.6 as I had spent a large chunk of my tokens already.

But here’s where I got stuck - the model tried tinkering with link types and even went ahead to add book covers off Amazon directly. It correctly identified a YAML parsing error but it went about in circles even confusing me what’s wrong with the project. 15 minutes down the drain with no new development.

I took a breath, spun up Opus again (with high /effort this time around), and this time instead of merely telling it what to fix, gave it more specific sources to look up. Obsidian Forum is a place I knew people have such discussions and CLI documentation can be reviewed. Here’s the final prompt that I gave it to seal the deal.

Maybe it was the detailed prompt or the change of model and a higher effort setting, that Opus patiently took its time to go through multiple forum pages and CLI documentation and realized that we had defined images as text instead! Something that I had guessed earlier but was too lazy to tell.

My experience with models during coding/any kind of knowledge tasks so far:

• Smaller models (like the Haiku 4.6) can often give you a faster output, burn less tokens and are ideal if you also are invoking tools instead of making the model write everything on its own

• Larger models (like the Opus 4.6), especially the best coding models, use their large context windows to ingest all the files at their disposal and properly reason through them before giving out an answer. They burn a shit ton of tokens (and possibly sip more water per call)

Here’s the final result. I’m more than happy with it though!

The “digital library” also looks good on mobile. Note that you should install Obsidian on your phone + set up sync (either through the official route or one of the many unofficial ways) for this to work.

Each link when clicked leads you to a free form book page, where you can add reviews and create wikilinks with other documents in your vault.

It’s offline first, which means that this catalog lives exclusively on your devices and on no third-party servers. You can access it even with a patchy internet connection. It’s also a good idea to stow away your internet devices if you’re trying to read deeply ;)

Finally, I’d like to remind how amazing these tools are: they have the ability to eliminate friction between thought and getting things to action in a very powerful way.

But it's also very clear that this is just a quick turnaround project. A proper book cataloging app requires so much more: UX, auth, cloud storage, social graphs. There are some alternatives, but none of them are both actively maintained and non-bloated at the same time. The best-looking one (Margins) is iOS only. If you're thinking about this space, as a builder, a reader, or both, I'd love to hear from you.

If you’ve come this far, I appreciate you and bless your attention span. For any more thoughts/feedback, my DMs are always open.

Cheers,
Samyak

...but now the Indian dream is to stay back and build something here that makes people want to stay. And we’re just getting started.

This reminded me of another clip by IIP (Ashris Choudhury) where a 20 y/o boy by the name of TN Subramaniam is seen talking highly about India (clipped at the bottom of this post) and how he’d choose to stay and be a part of the Indian growth story1.

Maybe it was that I was watching these videos at about 2 AM on a Monday, or my latent feelings about belonging, that this hit me harder than it would a few years back.

After all, what we’re trying to do at Masala Dew is to build software that taps into Indian culture, gets inspired by it and shapes it in a way nobody ever thought of doing before (even if some of these products sure did shape our cultural fabric inadvertently2). We want to build things that feel awesome, which gives our users a sense of connection about using something which was built from here, for here and beyond.

Products built in India can very well serve the world, just as they can serve the variety that is the Indian population – dozens of languages, hundreds of dialects, gazillions of dreams and aspirations.

As my friend says, “People vote with their feet”3. The best marker of success of Indian products is that people choose to stay with our digital goods, and find innate joy and satisfaction in using Indian clothes, driving on Indian roads and proudly stating their association with this country wherever they go. In other words, they vote with their valuable time and attention and deliberately choose to stay with us.

Our best talent in the domains of sports, scientific research, music and “just people” who’re looking to live a good life, should be able to find a home in our country and should be able to live here better than anywhere else in this world.

For those who reside outside this landmass may still be able to see the cultural narrative that speaks volumes about our own creativity as we craft our own tools and thereby our tools help us create more of that craft.

Therefore one of the key markers of success for an Indian brand like Masala Dew (and the dozens that will mushroom in the decade to follow) would be that we’re able to make them stay — both in the sense of software metrics (retention, engagement — plays on attention and time) and geographically (as in, opportunity to do great things).

Make them stay — in the hopes of being able to do something about this country, of being able to get back from it. Of feeling worthy of love and dignity in this country that we call home.

To make this happen, some of us will need to stay back and build while others look for an escape. We’ll need to address the root causes head-on, and make staying back the superior choice, both rationally and emotionally. We can draw on the knowledge of those who are out and away, to help us understand how things could be better for all of us, and for the world at large.

Oh yes, that’s the dream. Stay back and make them stay.

2

Think WhatsApp:

The India Notes 🇮🇳

WhatsApp owns India!

India’s most used business software isn’t chosen - it’s tolerated…

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7 months ago · 234 likes · 21 comments · Dharmesh Ba

Love abundantly, given time and attention are your only constraints. Marvel at God's creations. Pay homage to them by making your own things!

To love is to live. Love everyone, but most importantly, love yourself. When you love something, you take care of it with absolute agency. You take actions to improve the quality of existence of that thing. Money buys freedom. It buys the leverage that help you make multiple times the impact that you could've made otherwise. Technology is also such a leverage multiplier. Don't be consumed by them, but use them to live well.

If you find yourselves questioning your existence or the world at large, it's probably because you're not loving enough. Let go of your guard and allow yourselves to fall: care hard for people and things and you'll find yourselves longing to stay with the things you love forever.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

— Victor Frankl

Remember last year? That’s when I made my last post.1

I wrote a post on what Product Management is. I promised I’d do a follow-up on how will my role change with the coming times. Turns out, I wasn’t kidding! Even I’m surprised that I’m writing a sequel, after several failed promises.2

Note that whatever I say in the rest of this article should not be interpreted as anything beyond informed speculation, and is purely based on my experience working with these new tools so far. These views are personal, and in no way are linked to what my employer says or suggests.

You gotta be safe in these times, you know?

Now, here comes the fun part...

This is for my friends with shitty attention spans.

Will AI eat away my job?

1-mark answer: no.

2-mark answer: no, but I know that my role’s gonna change greatly over the next 3-5 years. The fundamentals of what a PM does are going to get more visible and impactful.

For the 20-mark answer, read on…

People are either too excited or too scared about AI and the way it might displace them.

However, to think of things from that angle (i.e. AI is being developed to replace humans and the jobs they do) is a wrong way to approach it.

Between the time I posted the prequel of this post till date, there have been several takes on the future of Product Management by some stalwarts on this topic. I’ll link to their takes towards the end of this post.

But I want to use this space to center this discussion to what would happen to our kind, especially to the Product Managers in India. But what I’m saying is pretty generic and should apply to everyone under the sun, including all sorts of knowledge workers (tech and non-tech).

A short view back to the past...

For those who don’t watch F1 and are not aware of this meme, I got you...

When I began my previous article (again, here if you haven’t read it already), I quote from his post on Product Management, where he mentions,

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

Then I went on to mention that Product Managers are paid for the leverage that they generate with their work. The kind of effort they put in towards the job is only as valuable as the output that they generate for their team.

In that sense, PMs already have a headstart as compared to the other jobs on the market, which traditionally involve submitting deliverables (code, designs, copies) for income.

Also, in that post, I tried putting all the knowledge work that anyone does through this (oversimplified) formula.

This equation will be the central thesis of today’s discussion.

Some hard facts

Love it or hate it, we live in a capitalist society. Turning around a profit is the most generous thing you can do for the world.3

If you remember third-grade mathematics, profit = selling price - cost price of anything you build.

Basically, it should cost you less than what you’re selling the item for to profit and keep running your business.

In the anticipation of turning around a profit, you recruit people who can find what should you build and how should you go about changing it4 to be able to stay relevant.

So, as a software business, you recruit people who can ideate, develop, grow and evaluate software solutions for you. You increase the cost of operations just so you can turn around a greater outcome which will (hopefully) more than cover the cost borne by hiring.

In terms of the direction of progress, most businesses profit by giving the world tools to slow down time or speed it up.5

When we say slowing down time, we mean to entertain, to pleasure, to make times worth remembering. When we talk about speeding up, it usually means skipping to the good part: by reducing the time it takes to build something, heal someone or just any job done.

With me, so far?

I don’t want to get political, but no business stands to benefit by hiring more people to do the same job. You may hire them for goodwill, but as a business, if you really wanna make it, you’ll try and make sure you’re getting the most out of the fixed number of people you’ve hired.

And that’s why we get all so existential about AI: we fear that it can take our job because we believe that businesses can go on and deliver the same outcomes without us. The businesses we work for, would no longer need us and we’ll eventually be doomed.

I’d go on and say, the fear does sound reasonable, does it not?

Now, where can we go wrong?

Businesses hold no interest in either creating or cutting jobs. May I be bold enough to say that jobs are lost because of a lack of innovation. Because there are no better ideas for the business to pursue. In a thriving organization, the same number of people eventually start looking around for other opportunities to capture the same market and bring out things that were previously deemed to be impossible.

Which means that even though a lot of “programmable” jobs can vanish in the next few years, a smart business will try to juice out more creativity out of the people they already have in their org without necessarily needing to shrink down.

But before going off another tangent, I want to refocus our discussion on the multipliers of knowledge work and how I see them changing.

Knowledge work
= Labour x Leverage x Taste

Labour

With AI going berserk, completing tasks, keeping an eye for any changes to instructions – I anticipate the labour part of this equation to dwindle with improvements to AI. A new element, which is purely managerial — orchestration — becomes super important.

That means that all aspects of your job which relate to labour — something as simple as writing a spec or as complex as telling the 10th stakeholder why was the ship date of a certain feature delayed, could be taken care of by AI.

Understanding orchestration is pretty simple. Remember this episode in Tom and Jerry where Tom becomes the conductor of a large orchestra? That’s what most people will end up doing in their day-to-day.

Give instructions to your computer, review the tasks done by it and move on to the next task at hand.

There was a time, which I like to remember as the “ugly middle”, when most of these tools were doing a half-assed job at writing docs or generating code, when people lost interest in them. That was simply because the technology was a good proof of concept, but it was not mature enough to take care of the tasks as promised.

But now, based on my personal experience of using tools like the Dia Browser, Cursor and Rovo’s Jira/Confluence integrations, I’ve seen phenomenal improvements. These tools can write complete code, generate documents and presentations with utmost clarity and help people turn around work without needing to master Excel or Powerpoint or Google Docs.

My best advice to PMs is something that I’ve been following myself for the last year or so: try out new tools unabashedly at work, to the point where they start breaking. Pro tip: don’t tell your colleagues that what you’ve been making is generated by AI. Otherwise they’ll come hounding at you even if the artefact is better than what they could’ve created themselves!6

If I wouldn’t be able to use ChatGPT to create this comic strip, I don’t think I’d have been motivated enough to commission it/hand-draw it and would’ve avoided putting it in this post at all.7

And if your job is defined by the number of hours you put to refine that doc, none of whose inputs are your own, then you’re not really in the right place.

You need to start looking at your work not from the lens of the output that you generate, but the outcomes that you eventually drive in your role.

Leverage

This is where the value of a PM, or for that matter, any kind of manager comes in. You might be working 10 hours a day working on a project for 10 months that only generates $10 in incremental revenue8. As a knowledge worker, in general, that’s not healthy — both in terms of lifestyle and for your career growth.

As a PM, you should look for ways to improve your leverage if you don’t have it already. If your job is to marshal resources to do the job, then marshal them as hard as you can. There are AI agents that could get the job done for you — from copywriting to creating prototypes, from creating custom emails to full-fledged presentations for execs — use all that you have to your advantage.

Get licenses to the most expensive tools your company could afford. In most situations, these tools will cost you a lot less than hiring someone full-time9. Plus, the quality is also kinda standard (see the next section for more on that quality question).

Without technology, more agency typically translated to more labour. With intelligent systems, more agency now means more leverage. More tasks done per minute. Time flies faster, things get done. Money flows in.

Even if you’re an IC (Individual Contributor) and don’t manage a team of people, think of yourself as a manager of agents. Recruit the best of them and see yourselves rising the ranks as someone who can pull bad business out of debt and good businesses straight to the moon!

But leverage is not just about recruiting agents at work. AI can be of limited help here, as influencing your org (especially upwards) will remain a key skill and in fact, get stronger as execution is largely delegated. Soft skills are your friend.

Taste

This is something which makes all the difference between a good and a great PM. And it’s pretty unfortunate to see that people talk about taste all the time and yet under-emphasize/seldom practice it.

People don’t work hard just for the sake of it. The best craftsmen you know — from the Michelangelos to the Linuses of the world — spent extra time in the kitchen because they wanted to cook their meals to perfection. They knew that there’s an ideal state worth striving for, and they wanted to put as many iterations as possible to make sure that the finished product is as per their expectations, and often well beyond what anyone could’ve imagined.

The good and bad thing about AI tools is exactly this. You can get yourself to a passable quality of output with ever-improving models, but it still takes a genius and a shitload of effort to produce something otherworldly. The floor is raised for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that the ceiling is still the same height.

If you think you lack clarity on what needs to get done out of an AI tool, spend time honing your craft manually. Hone attention to detail in such a way that no AI could beat you at what you’re good at. Reviewing roadmaps, codebases, customer feedback — all those are things that could only come about with deliberation.

A good indicator for good taste is when you can argue with a state-of-the-art AI model about the generated output and point out exactly what needs fixing for the output to elevate to the next level with high confidence.

A lot of high-leverage managers have these AI tools under their belt: production is commoditized now. And that’s why we’ll see more attempts at the same market problem, but only one will stick. The one which is the best out there.

For example: in the thousands of productivity apps, Notion stood out. In the thousands of web browsers available in the market, Arc stood out. Both iterated for excellence and tastefulness, and a kind of user quality which makes them hungry for more.

All in all, if I were to flash that ugly equation right before your eyes again (with some modifications)…

This is how I feel things would change for everyone.

Back to the original question

The leading question of this post was whether or not AI will take away my job.

I think it will take away parts of the job that I got good at, where AI will outperform me everytime. These were tasks that I dreaded to do anyway — think generating summaries of meetings or searching for the Confluence docs. Some of these problems are harder to solve than the others, but in the 4-5 year horizon, I lowkey see us getting to a point where humans don’t have to be in loop for these tasks at all.

These tasks, lovingly called b*tchwork, are anyway things I don’t enjoy doing.

However, all I know is that if I’m hired in a company to do b*tchwork, I’ll be easily replaced by a system that does it faster and more reliably. Good news? Yes, for some. Not for many!

The sad reality is a lot of the PMs work as arbiters and delegates for someone who’s not “free enough” to look into the minor details, without adding original inputs to problem statements. Also, I believe when PMs over-index metrics and OKRs without questioning them and thereby trade off the simple rule of Product Management — build something your user wants and is ready to shill a penny for — they should brace themselves for a crash.

If the company you’re deciding to work for is flexible enough to accommodate your (well-reasoned) creative input, is able to work nimbly across tasks, say no to what’s unimportant, only then can they expect to stay at that company and thrive there.

Being able to build an intuition of what my customers want, influence my team to do the right thing and use the (still) limited bandwidth of my product teams is something that is essentially my job. Everything else takes care of itself, as it should’ve already.

The bandwidth which then gets freed up can be used for exploring other domains which were just as important to pursue earlier. There were things that we thought wouldn’t fit as a 3-month long roadmap item, or something truly unimaginable but addresses a key user pain point.

Some of these problems are not pretty and exciting. Think making adjustments to a billing platform which is not prepared for a new product acquisition, which is what decides what gets built in-house v/s what’s acquired — these are critical decisions which need to be taken by humans. High leverage, high cost if things go wrong, but millions of ways to approach this problem. The AI does the work for me, but which route to take would still be decided by me.

The more exposure you have to a range of problem statements, the more you’ll hedge your career. The hedging will come about by improving taste, standards of excellence and simply the craft of building products.

Because at the end of the day, my favourite definition of Product Management is:

The art and science of building the right products for the right users to solve their problems.

And that’s never going out of fashion.

Some interesting takes on this topic

A lot of what I presented above comes from my own experience of seeing product teams run around me, mostly in India. Here are some interesting posts by people I look up to on this topic, which helped me form a more matured opinion on my take above.

• The Ken - Who killed the art of Product Management in India?

This post is inspired by all the genuine (and sometimes rhetoric) questions that people around me ask all the time.

• “So, what do you do for work?”

• “What do you actually do for work?”

• “So you attend meetings, and…?”

• “You got no hard skills, that’s why you chose PM hahaha”

Well, the last one may be true to some degree, but through this post I don’t want to defend what I do. I want to explain my role in the context of the changing times. Knowledge work as we know it, will change, and here’s me thinking out loud how these changes could affect our kind.

This is the first part where I try to explain, in very simple/honest terms and illustrations, what do I do for a living. In the second part, I’ll try to dissect why and how my role won’t look the same in the next few years (and so will yours).

So, what do I really do for a living?

My job title reads: Product Manager1 at Atlassian.

And I’m being honest with you: I get paid a fair bit for whatever I do and sometimes it’s hard for even me to understand why am I even getting anything in a world where engineers code, designers design and salespeople sell.

This is a source of imposter’s syndrome for a lot of people like me: this nagging feeling of we don’t deserve to be where we are.

But here’s what: we’re wired to understand labour but not leverage. That alone makes a world of difference.

But wait, what do I do again?

I earlier used to define my role as “the art and science of building the right products for the right people.” This even has some semblance of truth in it. But it doesn’t go on to explain what I’m exactly responsible for.

I loved this definition by the OG Lenny Rachitsky in his blog post: What is Product Management

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

That’s essentially it. It’s all communication and leverage.

As much as I hate to say it as an engineer-by-degree, PM is very much a business-first role.2

Your job as a PM is to read the users better than they can tell it themselves, and build exactly the product that your company can expect sell them. You have to do everything in power to make sure that happens.

Marshaling resources could mean convincing your business unit that your idea will generate value for the business. It could also mean convincing your engineers that they’re working on the right problems and prioritizing their long to-do list of pending items. It could so as far as disagreeing with your leadership team to say that the strategy that they’ve sketched out sounds good on paper but it’s gonna be a disaster in practice, but you go ahead and do it anyway

So typically in a PM role, there are different seniorities. The more you grow in your role, the more forward-looking you have to be. The more senior you are, the more high-leverage problems you pick up. You grow in your role from owning features to owning product lines.

Example: A junior PM in Google might be responsible of making sure that the Archive feature in Gmail works as expected, a Senior VP might be responsible for the success of the entire Google Workspace suite.

Hold on, what’s this leverage thing you keep talking about?

Glad you asked (or at least I imagined you’d ask).

Leverage is derived from the word lever, which is, simply-put, a see-saw.

If the load were 69 kg, I’d be able to move it even if the fulcrum was in the middle. No, I’m serious about that number.

If the load were 120 kg I’d still be able to (theoretically) move the load if I was allowed to move the fulcrum.

Archimedes said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Again, not sure where he’d order that kind of a lever from, but let’s believe him for a sec for he’s Archimedes at the end of the day.

But in principle, what it means is that you can take up big problems and solve them if you can marshal a group of people (or AI agents3) towards solving it. That’s why the product management role is so valuable in a company, it ensures that a bunch of talented people work on the right problem statements in an aligned, structured manner. Believe it or not, but the larger any company grows, the more structure it needs. And that’s what mandates a PM — ensure alignment, clarity of vision and structure. In other words, make it easy for everyone to understand what we’re building, why we’re building it and how will we structure the solution to solve the problem at hand.

This act of marshaling is neither easy nor is as jolly as it might seem.

• Imagine building a new product because your competitor has done it, and because you’re as big as them. Only to realize that it was such a disaster that despite your best attempts it didn’t amount to much and you had to shut it down (cough Google+4 cough).

• Or that kernel update which went out and wrecked havoc on 8.5 million devices across the globe: freezing banks, delaying flights and effectively sterlizing most of the work PCs running Windows (cough Crowdstrike5 cough).

• Or that AI-based customer support system that resulted in a lot of support staff being laid off, only to be boarded back again because oh it wasn’t working so well after all (cough Klarna6 cough).

To be clear: It’s NOT that these companies were plain careless and over-the-top as it might look from the outside — in fact, they had all the reasons to do what they did. But of the millions of things that could go wrong, a couple did despite the best efforts (except the third one, of course). And that’s all it takes.

Or simply that your engineering, business, design teams are understaffed/unmotivated for any of the million possible reasons — doesn’t matter, it all comes back at you. After all, your team’s performance is eventually your performance.

In essence, a bunch of things can go wrong between ideation, development, deployment and maintenance. You just gotta ensure that things work out as planned. Simple? Maybe. Easy? No.

As as a PM, you’re held responsible for it all.

That’s both a blessing and a curse of being in a role which mostly revolves around communication and decision-making.

In practice, I spend most of my time doing the following:

• Prioritize asks coming in from various people into an easy-to-digest roadmap for our development teams, making adjustments as needed.

• Write requirement docs (what has to be built and why) for product teams.

• Keep checking-in with my engineering, business and design counterparts, either through text or video calls to make sure they’re unstuck.

• Bring up any open questions to relevant forums and initiate a lot of external comms.

• Pitch and prepare team wins, metrics, etc. to report back to leadership.

• Keep an eye out on the what’s going on within the company and in the industry and keep bringing up new things to work on.

• Create and respond to a TON of Jira tickets and Confluence pages.

• Be prepared to be pulled into any leadership escalations where you have to justify why a certain project was delayed by x days/weeks or de-priortized.

If any of those things seem fun to you, yes that’s a part of the job. If any of these sound scary/icky to you, they’re still part of the job and the curse of this thing called leverage — the independence of being able to take decisions on your team’s behalf.

Someone jokingly said in my office: “As a PM you’re the last one to get appreciated when anything goes right, and the first one to be hounded when anything goes wrong.”

Seems like he wasn’t kidding anyway.

Let’s describe this with a real-but-oversimplified example

This one’s a classic.

In my company, I work on the billing engine and experience of our customers, which sees billions of dollars flowing through it every year.

In my role, I was asked to do something to improve the number of customer support tickets that we were getting in any given month so that our support team could breathe and respond to the more important ones.

What I started doing was figure out what kinds of tickets were coming at us and why were they taking so long to respond.

It turns out that the issue was relatively simple; the support team was taking up complex asks from our larger customers, leaving behind tickets which were “low” in priority in their classification. This led to a surge in the number of tickets and a breach of the response time that we assure customer (we’ll get back to you in 1-3 business days, only that our business days were from the moon).

What we started doing was explore an automation which was being used by a different support team and rebuild it according to obey the rules of our billing engine. We allowed the automation to take a first stab at the problem, place an order and respond back to the customer on behalf of the support team.

We faced some issues here and there, but eventually the automation started taking up around 40% of all support tickets. I got promoted (wuhuu).

Okay, enough about me.

I know I haven’t done a very comprehensive job of explaining what did I do to get here and why, but there are a million resources available that will do a far better job at explain those bits to you. Some of my favourites:

• Exponent (YouTube channel — prep-friendly material)

• PM School (YouTube channel — prep-friendly material, Indian context)

• (Podcast, Newsletter (paid) — great speaker lineup and excellent industry insights)

• (Podcast, Newsletter (paid) — practical resources and career advancement stuff)

Just like you all, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this new wave of artificial intelligence and automation will change the way I look at the world. More importantly, how good or bad can it be for me in the short-to-medium term. Should I upskill in my product craft or should I explore setting up a small farm of organic vegetables?

More on that in a post to follow.

I thought of sharing it because of three reasons:

1. AI eating away jobs has not been a post-LLM phenomenon (for context, ChatGPT was launched towards the end of 2022)

2. The effects of AI in almost all sectors have been overestimated by optimists and underestimated by the pessimists. As with all things, we’re currently in the boring middle of things.

3. I’ve not been able to write a lot these days, so I’m pushing out stuff I wrote in the past, just like the Bollywood songs of today which are all recycled garbage versions of the OG songs. At least I’m better because I didn’t publish this yet. Or maybe not, ‘cause this shit’s kinda outdated (but still surprisingly relevant)…

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the topic I was scared to put my thoughts out on my newsletter so far: Eyyy Aaiii 💦

Insert all great things are scary-type quote

Back in London in 1700s, when the mechanized handloom was first invented, people were in an emotionally charged state. I imagine some 16-year old Tom to be fascinated by the working parts of the machine, whereas 45-year old Ed was shit scared seeing the machine as a good reason through which his rich boss would fire him.

Since then, our population has nearly grown tenfold, but the ratio of people dying of hunger is at an all-time low. A lot of people doing manual labour lost their livelihoods, but now we have more people than ever, working way into their seventies, which means that they’ve found more work to do. Per unit impact that people could have created a few hundred years back to now is like comparing an ant’s weight to a flea. Still we can find our own versions of Tom and Ed in our modern society. As they say, some things never change. Most of these universal constants arise from our biology — our perception of fear and excitement has not changed by much over centuries.

There has been a great deal of panic regarding the advent of AI into some of the things people interact with everyday — driving, stock trading, building, curing diseases, designing and even programming. There has been an ever-looming fear that AI’s going to conquer the world in some way, that we’ll become slaves to it. Let’s talk about this existential question later on. For now let’s focus on it’s one of many aspects — employment.

I’d argue that the current deficit of employment is because of two big reasons: lack of skill and upper-level organization. It’s certainly not excess of people, but the excess of people in one narrow domain. With an increasing number of people, there are increasing number of problems. Here’s a hint on the industries that require our attention.

That being said, we have to understand there will always be a demand for humans — humans which have the right set of skills for the right time. We don’t have to work against machines, we have to work with them. Artificial Intelligence, like all the other tools we have, is simply a very powerful tool — who yields it and uses it for what makes all the difference.

This just means that you won’t be paid for heavy lifting. You will instead be paid for what to lift, and how to optimize the method of lifting. Old jobs will perish and new jobs will take its place.

What kind of jobs, you ask? David Epstein in his book ‘Range’ talks about a broader set of skills in combinations no one ever expected, followed by Cal Newport’s advice on working deeply, which has become a rare commodity, to be the best cocktail of traits that we should attack. These could bring more people to the high-value careers they expect. They require some work, they require you work against the tide, but they will end up paying you big, in all currencies. For others, earning enough to put food on your table and sleep soundly should become easier and with the computing power of tomorrow.

At the same time, learning the very intricacies of how things work on the most fundamental level could create new breakthroughs and solve some problems which would otherwise seem impossible to solve by the broad thinker.

All in all, we need both nodes and connectors — some people who can think deeply and some others who can find creative wonder between disciplines. AI will help both of them do better.

I’ve been a bit too occupied with work ever since I came back from my trip, and only now have I been able to make time for this post. More to follow!

Part 1 - Tap & Go!

My favourite feature of the London Tube network (which is a very weird-but-extensive network of trains and buses across the city) is the tap-and-go method of travel.

While Dublin relies on travel cards and cash, in London you can hop onto any bus with your credit card (a real one or something loaded on a phone) and tap “in” without really telling the driver where you wish to go. The same goes for the London subways. When you reach your destination, you must tap “out” to exit the tube station. You are charged for the trip on the next day.

Here’s how it works:

• Your card is read and stored on Transport for London’s (TfL) database through an anonymized identifier

• A temporary authorization charge of ~£0.1 is deducted from the card, which is later adjusted in the fee

• If you’re taking the bus, you’re charged a flat fee of £1.75. If you take another bus within an hour, you won’t be charged extra (as it’s perceived that you’re simply continuing on your journey)

• If you’re taking the metro or a boat, you’ll be charged based on the minimum fare considering the distance, timing (peak v/s non-peak hours), zones crossed, etc. and a weekly cap is applied so that you don’t have to pay too much for travelling too much

• All of these commutes are accrued, and total amount is deducted from the card on the very next day

Also, this is only true of the intra-city tube network, and not the trains run by 4-5 semi-private operators across the UK. I’d like to believe this is because of the unpredictability and high cost of operating trains over the tube. Some things to consider:

• Before taking a train out of the station, you need to estimate the number of bogeys that will go along the driver engine. For that, you need to have at least a rough number of passengers boarding the train

• Train networks don’t see a very high number of regular commuters. Which means that these passengers may be using the trains on a one-off basis, not to use them again in weeks or months.

• If you overestimate the number of passengers, you may increase the cost of fuel burnt*[1] to operate the train on its regular path (because pulling more bogeys will require more energy)

• If you underestimate this number, you run at a risk of poor passenger experience, a lot of them might have to stand on chair cars (happened to me once during a trip from Oxford to London), making it a bad experience even for the passengers who’re sitting on their seats

Even though it doesn’t scale well for inter-city scenarios, this tap-and-pay approach to the intra-city transport has some obvious benefits and some not-so-obvious downsides, and I’m here to give my personal take on each of these.

Finally, I am trying to determine whether this approach is viable for the Indian public transit network and may help boost its usage.

Advantages

1. Easy-peasy

The tap-to-pay system was so convenient and fun to use that I happily paid the extra ~4% forex that my Indian credit card was charging to transact in GBP. I just needed to look up my route on Google Maps and hop on the tube by tapping my phone on the card reader (I used GPay to set up my card, and it worked like a charm).

2. Freedom of price

It’s clear that TfL is more concerned about Londoners using the tube instead of generating the most profit per passenger, as should all public transport services do.

Upper caps on the tube will encourage commonfolk to use more of the service, eventually helping the service stay afloat financially. No matter how far you go, you’d need to pay at most ~₹400 for your bus ride.

This is the only mode of transport which was reasonable within the Indian standards. It’s a steal for someone who’s earning in £££.

A centrally-managed cost structure across the London Tube network provides much room for creativity. Imagine TfL deciding to offer a 50% off for all travelling passengers during national holidays. Such as system could be programmed very easily on the same day because anyway the revenue has to be collected the next day.

3. Rush hour? Move fast!

As the bus driver, if you don’t have to attend a long queue of incoming passengers, asking them where they want to go and handing them a ticket everytime, you’d save up on a lot of time and effort, which you can direct towards keeping the bus on time. This becomes even more important and useful during rush hours.

This especially helps a labour-deficient market like the UK, where you’d typically see the same bus driver:

• Driving the bus

• Stowing passenger luggage

• Helping outsiders through their route-related doubts

• Helping passengers be entertained through some poorly-rehearsed dad jokes

The Europeans have figured out a way to work and live alone. I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it surely helps their case!

4. One card, many places

Going back to the convenience point: the card that I used to pay at the restaurant is the same that I’d use to pay for any of my tube rides across the city. I don’t have to buy a different travel card, create new QRs or purchase physical tickets.

In fact, buying tickets ad-hoc will cost you more in a lot of situations than using your credit card and availing the cost-capping benefits I described earlier.

5. No competition, duh

It also helps that Ubers are goddamn expensive in the UK, and the tube is almost as cheap as commuting in India. You can’t go door-to-door without shelling something like ₹1000-1500 for travelling between two points less than 5 km apart!

True story: I paid £12+ for a 3.5 km ride using an Uber, which would’ve cost me roughly £2 on the double-decker bus! Don’t ask me why I did it.

Disadvantages

1. Once you tap you can’t go back

My friend and I tapped on the Uber boat running across the River Thames, only to realize that the last boat left the shore 30 minutes ago. Since we had already tapped in, we had to make peace with the £1-3 that were to be charged on our cards. Pretty expensive for not going anywhere, innit?

Kinda obvious, but the payment counters should be disabled when the last bus/train/boat has already departed. Having a basic LED monitor which shows how much your card will be charged and whether the stop/port is functional at all could be great, but it doesn’t exist today (for reasons which could also be slyly intentional).

2. Don’t have a credit card? Get one!

For such a system to work and show effects, you need a large number of credit-enabled passengers. If there are passengers who don’t carry their credit card, they need to pay in cash or get themselves an Oyster card. As a tourist with no credit card, that could be a problem, but there’s a baseline expectation of having a tap-to-pay card during your trip to Europe if you’re coming from India.

3. Responsibility on the driver and chances of fuck-ups

This approach can be misused in low-social-trust, high-population societies like the metros of India. Imagine boarding during the rush hour and not tapping in at all. Since London buses typically don’t have a conductor, the driver may not be able to police the passengers, especially if too many of them are too many.

Just for the thrill of it, I was able to get away with a free ride by just climbing on the bus and heading straight to the upper deck of the London double decker. I felt a bit too uncomfortable and guilty to do it a second time though!

No matter what you do, you need a baseline social trust within society for any system to work. I’ve talked about it at length in this essay.

Can we recreate this in India?

Now here’s the million-dollar crore-rupee question: will this system of public transit and payment work in India?

Even though I’d love to see it here, my verdict here would be — not quite, not yet. Not without adjustments, at least.

The reasons behind it are pretty simple:

• Credit penetration in India still lags at about 5-6%, compared to the 62% in the UK. It’s fair to assume that a megapolis like London would easily cross 70%+. Low number of credit cards among the common folk in India means that people won’t be able to avail a lot of benefits of this system

• The variable cost structure and get-charged-next-day features found in the London tube might generate confusion and a lack of trust in the minds of price-sensitive Indian consumers. We put an outsized effort into negotiating for value-for-money over experience, which might not be a bad thing at all — it’s just the way we roll in India!

• Finally, it’s sad to say, but the lack of social trust and well-to-do people trying to haggle away/misuse public resources for the tiniest expenses remains a big problem for the biggest Indian cities. As my friend Mrdul has put it in his essay, fraternity is an immeasurable yet important indicator of a progressive society. Not having a shared sense of responsibility for public goods like buses can deteriorate the experience for everyone over time and burn the system to the ground due to unprofitability. There’s a reason why public transport is frowned upon by anyone who can merely afford a cab. The reasons are also sometimes justified: safety, hygiene, time v/s cost.

That being said, we can still target a robust public transit system; never in the history of this country were buses and metros across Tier-1 cities needed more than today. In fact, foundations for these are being laid across as we speak. Think of these examples:

• Being able to purchase Delhi Metro tickets using WhatsApp

• RuPay NCMC cards that could act as credit cards as well as transit cards

• Multi-mode tickets through ONDC-based Namma Transit and Tummoc, which work in ways very similar to Stockholm’s SL app

I’ll talk more about these and my experience using each of these in posts to follow.

I know this has been quite the post, and no attempt to shorten it could get this under 1500 words. But hey, I hope you enjoyed reading it! If you’d like to nerd over public mobility, feel free to shoot me a DM and we can have a coffee chat in Bangalore or Delhi.

Take care and keep moving!

Cheers,
Samyak

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Indians may hate the British all they want, but there's one thing they did well. Even if it stood to benefit them during that time. It's the introduction of some pieces of modern infrastructure: like trains!

The first rail line between Bombay and Thane was introduced all the way back in 1853. This was barely 22 years after the first rail line in the world was introduced between Liverpool and Manchester. It's important to mention that 22 years in the 1800s were a lot smaller than 22 years in the 2000s purely in terms of technological progress.

So, it's safe to say we had an early bird ticket into this wood-steel-and-coal madness.

Today, India is one of the most well-connected railway systems in the world. It's the fourth-largest network and perhaps the most electrified train networks in the world, with lines and stations scattered everywhere on the map of the country.

In the name of writing discipline and my newfound fascination with trains and city transport in general (tbh I've just gotten bored of flights), I'll be posting some unstructured thoughts and views that I captured from English and Welsh trains during my trip to the UK. There are some big lessons for us, and interestingly, some things that we're doing better already.

I'll compare and contrast how is the process of moving about different for developed countries like those of the UK and Europe, and see if we can derive any lessons from them as a developing nation ourselves. I'll also peek into a few things that we're already doing better than our Western counterparts.

Since I wrote most of this during my train rides in the UK and my flight back to India, I'll focus mainly on the means of transport that I saw in the UK and Ireland in the posts to follow.

Mobility is that ether in our society which is often overlooked when present, but hits hard when it's absent. In the ever-stationary roads of Bangalore and water-clogged streets of Gurgaon, we come to terms with its weaknesses and curse the weather gods and global warming for the puddles and Olympic-sized swimming pools on the main roads of Marathahalli or Sector 32.

In the expansive 8 and 16-lane expressways between Gurgaon/Mumbai or Noida/Agra, we bless the same weather — always making plans for roadtrips and hunting for memories that might last us a lifetime.1

How easily you can move about in a city is a strong determinant of how progressive and vibrant the city is. A still city is a stagnant city, with a lot of hidden potential and perhaps opportunities for new economies. So that's why having this conversation becomes all the more important if we want to assess for our ourselves how good we're doing in the 21st century so far, and what's the direction that we should take to become the “vishwaguru” that we’ve set ourselves to be by 2047.

Fun fact: I started this newsletter titled "Every Place has a Soul" and I wanted to capture cultural aspects of travelling and observing different places. I had just come back from my trip to Finland & Sweden back then. I was fascinated by how people move. The first newsletter topic that I had on my mind was the public transport system of Finland. So, yeah, it's kind of a full-circle moment for me as this topic becomes a Masala Dew conversation.

I'm so excited about the posts to follow2. Let's begin!

Cheers,
Samyak

So, it's the end of something epic.

All of a sudden, the lovely cobblestone streets, the gentle British summer sun, the cool and fragrant breeze, the "thank you" and "sorry"s — all seem to disappear from the front of my senses. My body preps itself for dealing with the brashness, the pollution, the loud horns, and the louder voices as I sit on the EK516 in the Dubai airport.

After a bout of Jack Harlow and The Beatles, AP Dhillon and Shubh mark their return on my playlist. My nostrils give way to the smell of aamchur after conveniently forgetting the sweet smell of hot chocolate of Oxford. My sense of touch and hygiene are somewhat back, as I pull back my socks on the ground, which I could've scaled barefoot without much thought.

All this and more at the Dubai airport, even before my flight takes off.

The two weeks I've spent taking a rather unusual trip to the UK and Ireland is supposed to "transform" me in some profound way, but I'm yet to see any effects. My trip back home should give away any such symptoms of newfound amazingness.

But I'll be real – I dunno why but I feel different. Different in a way I interpret what my senses have already been capturing from the world around. I feel a stronger sense of the time passing by and it feels like I've also grown a little older (this one definitely true!). This trip has helped me conduct myself as the adult as I should now be.

But that's all about me: from now on, at least in the next few posts to follow, I'll try reporting my observations about trains, people, footpaths, music and whatever else caught my attention during my travel time. I'll also talk about how my workation experiment went, and the learnings that came out of it, and what do I really think about remote work (yay, we have a sequel coming in!). I might go into some nerdy trivia-sharing or break into the shayar mode that tries looking everything like it's out of a movie scene (and fails miserably).

All in all, I have a lot to share with y'all, and I can't wait to churn out a few posts for a newsletter that might seem dead to some by now (this is just the start; trust me). As my flight prepares for takeoff, I prepare for what lies ahead of me in India, and will use this space to cherish what I left behind in the British Isles*.1

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For now... Dilli Chalo!

Cheers,
Samyak

It had been alluring authors onboard, targeting a very specific set of users (somewhat like a BookTube crowd), but now expanding into more of the general audience with very standard social media formats — long-ish notes, live video, podcasts, and now even short videos (eww)!

Short videos? On a platform that’s meant to serve long-form content? Oh, come on!? I’m pretty frustrated at that. And guess what, it even does that swiping thing which brings up a new short video. I’m so glad though, that I have maintained my streak of not flicking through a short video ever (except this time when I sneezed while scrolling through my phone), I’m not sure how I’m managing to pull it off in this economy.

The only thing that pulls me back to Substack is the excellent community of power users, lack of spammy content (it’s not perfect, but it’s nearly not as bad as Twitter) and the collection of some of my favourite publications. The platform is serving as a good way for growth for writers who can enjoy censorship-free distribution and sustain themselves just through their content.

And maybe Substack's right when it does so. After all, it's meant to be a product for creators to earn through what they make. Substack, in return, gets a share of the creator's revenue. I find this to be a better model for creators, unlike most of the Meta platforms which earn through ~~intrusive~~ personalized ads. Substack, on the other hand, is providing more options for creators to engage with their audiences, allure them through their well-curated notes, shorts and longs(!?) and convert them to a paid subscriber. Even if the creator is not earning out of Substack, Substack's doing a good job at giving a medium to for these often new creators to leverage its algorithm and find an audience who's interested in your work.

With more pressure from their harbingers of revenue (creators and god-forbid: VCs) and the competition from platforms with large network effects (Twitter, Instagram), introducing shorts on Substack might've been an inevitable step. Something which Hamish and co. might've scoffed at doing, but had to do anyway to stay relavant and keep increasing its base of users.

However, I think it's going to be increasingly important (and difficult) for Substack to maintain its standing as a positive, thought-provoking social media platform, and it actively tries differentiating itself from the "traditional" media and social media, such as The Washington Post or Twitter. Maybe it needs to rethink what it is, fundamentally: currently a platform, and not a protocol. But it’s close.

I was inspired to write this after being blinded by Substack's light-themed editor. Imagine a big box of white light staring at your face, while you're browsing for 1+ hour in dark mode in a dark room. ☠️

But it also served as a reminder on how should my writing workflow be. What I create should not start from the Substack editor, or least my computer screen (which is where I do most of my writing). It typically starts off as a set of pointers on a piece of paper, which then gets translated to a first-draft Notion doc. I make my final edits on the screen of the editing platform that I'm using to publish my article, to share it with the wider world.

I plan to post my upcoming blogs/newsletters on Samyak's Nook (my "real" blog) followed by Masala Dew (Substack newsletter). I've been doing it the other way round, in case you ever noticed. You’ll be notified whenever I make a post on Substack and you’d be able to read it, but I still want to maintain my blog with all the good stuff that I create in the future. The blog feels more like it’s mine: a digital garden which I can curate the way I want. Substack, on the other hand, gives off a rental place vibe. You get me?

However, the experiment goes on. I'll be posting heavily on Substack in the months to come, at least till the end of this year. This will be the social media that I'll be the most active on. I might lurk on to Twitter, LinkedIn or even Instagram every once in a while. But if you wanna find me, you now know where to go.

I’ll talk more about social media ownership models, censorship rules, network effects, protocols v/s platforms, micro → macro effects on wellbeing caused by social media and so much more in the posts which follow.

If that’s your vibe, pls subscribe! Thank you.

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I’ve been trying to keep my writing schedule as tight as possible. It’s not been easy, with something like two-and-a-half jobs worth of meetings, docs, and deadlines up my sleeve, but hey, who wants to do the easy stuff anyway?

Today, I want to talk about something I’ve had the privilege(?) of experiencing as much as anyone could. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with remote work. As for how and why — I’m here to tell you all about it!

This is not a single post but a series of three posts. This is broken down into

• Why not then?

• Why now?

• How about tomorrow?

I mean, it could’ve been a single post too, but I also know that your attention span sucks. So, you’re welcome!

Today, we will talk about what made remote work infeasible yesterday and a possibility today.

Let’s start!

Work From Anywhere has been a concept that many science-fiction books (and even cartoons) fantasised about a great deal.

We are most affected by ideas we are fed as children, which we grow to idealise and bring to real life.

Our generation was inspired not only by what was going on around them but also through our consumption of TV, books, YouTube videos, and other such media. So, attending school remotely was something I had dreamt of doing after watching Doraemon.

In one episode, Suneo talks about how, in the near future, he could attend his classes through a TV screen right next to his bathtub. He would never be late for class that way, especially during winter. The idea seemed very cosy to me as I watched the cartoon with my brother, eating piping hot dal chawal in the chilly Delhi winters when the last thing that I wanted to do was go to school.

Suneo also revealed his ulterior motive for attending these classes remotely in the episode. Not being physically present for a class would’ve meant he could use a few extra minutes to sleep more (or not need to wake up at all properly) and not bother himself with the harsh winter outside of his home. He’s shown to enjoy his classes sipping juice from his bathtub.

What we thought would be a product of 22nd-century technology made its way into our lives a bit too early. During the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all of us started working remotely in some way. This also went on to show that remote work had at least been feasible for a few years before the pandemic started and forced everyone to comply.

The trend in India has only been more extreme.

But where did it all start? Let’s dive deeper.

We see an influx of people from villages to cities sometime during the late 17th century, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. It made sense for people to move where they could earn more, especially when new manufacturing and textile hubs were popping up in major cities.

It’s kinda funny to think that there would’ve been a time in history when village life was considered uncool and dull, and going to work in the factory would’ve been the “dream” of a few schoolboys back in the day. The grass is always greener on the other side, isn’t it?

As the demand for goods produced by these industries increased, so did the industries themselves. That meant that more people were hired and brought in from villages. More room was needed to accommodate more people, and that’s how new cities were built, and the old ones expanded.

Cities in India developed until the 18th century were built without a very tight concept of zoning, or followed “mixed zoning”, as we call it today. This meant that commercial spaces, industries and residential areas were built close to each other so that people could conveniently walk to work or use a cycle or slowly-moving public transport like trams. Just let it sprawl!

People initially tried living as close to the city centre1 as possible, purely because of convenience. Those who lived there were able to win at life and work, and eventually, these were the areas that became the most expensive because of heightened demand and fixed supply. People who wanted to retire from the bustle from the city life and to rejuvenate went back to the outskirts where life was calm and the prices were low.

It’s also amusing that areas like Vasant Kunj in Delhi, Powai in Mumbai, Marathahalli in Bangalore or Gomti Nagar in Lucknow were once called “city outskirts”. But that’s how urbanisation goes — cities expand, and what was once unknown, now becomes hot property.

There’s also something interesting that happened in the 20th century. Cars were now also accessible to the commons, and many cities developed keeping the “future” in mind: a future full of cars and bikes and buses, which would reduce the distance between point A and point B. This would allow people to live a little far away as well at affordable places, and drive to work instead of walk to go there.

All this was okay up till a certain point. Detroit and Chicago models were applied throughout cities in the world. La Courbusier was the MVP then, and areas like Chandigarh, Delhi Cantonment were built under his supervision.

Who wants to walk if they can run… I mean, run their cars and bikes?!

But too much everything good is also a bad thing.

We know how this ends, don’t we? Lines upon lines of cars arranged like ants on long, winding roads that are barely walkable, barely breathable. The new-age countries (like most of the Global South) that adopted this model of development late were the most affected by it.

People started spending several hours per day just traveling to and from the office. Those who could (barely) afford a home close to their workspace had to pay extra rent—way more than what they’d pay when they stayed away from the city centre.

On the other side of the world, back in the 1960s, the US Department of Defense figured out a way for computers to talk to one another, which led to ARPANET and then the Internet. It would finally be possible for computer users to do computer stuff from far away.

Fast-forward to the 2020s. Mobile internet speeds are good for video calls and 4K video streaming. Multiplayer collaborative tools like Figma and even the OG Google Docs allow different people to work on the same file, without users needing to have the file on their local machines.

And sometime in the 2010s, a few software engineers, whose jobs relied almost entirely on coding and communicating primarily through text, were the first to adopt what we now know as remote work. They built tools that allowed others to live the life they were living, while these engineers were able to profit off it. Win-win, I guess?

So, (1) not being able to live near a city purely because of ₹₹₹ and (2) a convenient way that allows you to stay far and yet get shit done incentivised people to work remotely.

If commute times weren’t too long and if most people still walked to work, it was unlikely that remote work would’ve picked up pace. Also, if we didn’t have what we now call as multiplayer tools such as Office 365 products, Slack, Zoom, Loom, Jira, Confluence <inserts 10 other Atlassian products>, we wouldn’t have been nearly as excited about working from home anyway.

The next edition would be more personal and zoomed in — how these multiplayer tools do the things they do and what has been my experience as a remote worker — would be covered in the next episode of this series.

Till then,
Breathe!2

2024 was a funny year.

I travelled a lot, and still felt like I had to travel a lot more. I worked a lot, still I felt like there was so much more that needed to be done. I got a lot of things right, but my mind still lingers around the mistakes I made, big and small.

That’s innate human nature, isn’t it? Don’t you gravitate towards ranting about things that didn’t work and how you tried doing everything right and still you didn’t make it through?

Well, even if you disagree, I’m sure you must’ve done something similar in the past. This phenomenon even has a name for it.

Psychologists/UX Researchers and Gen-Zs have something in common. Just like there’s now a label for every dating scene that has ever occurred in the history of humankind (relationships, situationships, benching, zombieing and what not!), there’s a special term for what I mentioned above.

It’s called negativity bias and it’s perhaps the primary reason why news exists and so do we. I’ll talk more about media and Gen-Z dating in the posts to follow, but for now I want to take the conversation back to 2024.

Well, the year is now gone. In 24 hours it feels that it was an ancient relic, and in a good way. I had bouts of success but felt like I didn’t do a very good job at things which compound. Be it working out, checking in with old friends or learning something entirely new. And also, this newsletter ofc.

So, here I am to announce that I’m wrapping it up just getting started here. I’m getting started for the last 5 years or so but now for real1

In the process of starting and restarting, I compound. I find that to be very beautiful. Compounding is nothing but mindless repetition of things which are challenging, and as I write this, I suddenly realize that the newsletter is not dead anymore. I’m writing something instead of overthinking about what if my post turns out to be absolute garbage (which it’s eventually gonna be anyway).

I looked back at my personal blog, and in the process I realized that I added a shit ton of posts in the process of starting, restarting, quitting and apologizing. There have been blips of madness — posts which have gotten a 1000+ views and DMs on how some of these posts resonated deeply with close friends and strangers alike. As someone who writes, that’s the best gift you can ask for — people discussing your shit with you or even better, among their own circles.

Which is what I also implore you to do. If you’re failing at something, try it slightly differently and fail again. Better still, try something entirely new and be prepared to fail at it. You’ll compound slowly, but only when you try and try again.

As for this newsletter, it’s hard for me to promise a certain frequency of posting. But it’s gonna get better because my approach towards publishing here would not be to cherry pick topics and research very deeply and write detailed essays about them. In fact, I’ll try to do quite the opposite — simply yap about things I care about. I don’t care whether what I post is your favourite topic or not, it certainly will be one of my favourite topics. I’m not a journalist and I want to enjoy writing as I always have. The self-inflicted pressure to be “accurate” and “well put-together” didn’t really serve me well in the last year.

So, please be easy on me and be open-minded about the things you see here. I might not be writing about your secret interests, but maybe you’ll like it more than anything else after you read about it; who knows?

Well, this was my moment of reflection, and I meant to post this a couple of days back while I was still in 2024. But better late than never, they said.

Notice that the first verb in this post is “travel”, which is also I plan to do a lot of more of this year. Right now I’m chilling in the chilly Delhi winters, and typing this wrapped like a burrito at my home with family.

But merely 10 days back, I was boasting about taking out my laptop in my hostel reception at Krabi at 30°C and having the ability to work from there.2

My next few posts are going to be about exactly this — remote work. How did it come to existence, how is it going these days and what’s there to come in the next few years?

Till then, I hope you have your New Year resolutions sorted3 and also try out things that compound. But most importantly, I hope you get enough time to relax and have fun!

On a parting note, here’s the acoustic version of a song my flatmate and I are vibing to for several months at this point.

Wish you a beautiful 2025!

Long time, no see?

I’ve been busy with a lot of work, but going forward, I’ll be trying to make it lesser of an excuse than it is.

I’ll be posting every week no matter what, until the end of this year. It’s a pretty daunting task tbh, but every now and then I like giving myself some wild challenges.

The good part is, that it’s not my first time writing online. If you know you know; I’ve been writing online since 2019, on my two personal blogs.

Today’s post is throwback material, something that I wrote way back in September 2021. I find it relevant to post it today because cryptocurrencies and the whole ordeal of “we don’t trust the government with our money” has been gaining momentum again in the US market since Trump won the elections and DOGE was recognized as something official.

In a world with so many variables, who would you trust? Would society be helped if we were rewarded for being trustworthy, instead of simply being penalized for being a cheat? This is pretty much the essence of today’s post.

This post is mired with limitations and incomplete ideas. My lack of understanding of game theory (and the tech scene in general) is pretty evident in this one. But this should push me to get my head out of my ass and spend some time reading about these things deeply.

I often tend to think very lowly of the things I publish. But let me know what you think of it. Some words of encouragement make me feel better about myself hehe…

Originally posted on 08 Sep, 2021

A lot of our institutions rely on humans' innate ability to lie, cheat, deceive and lack trust for their own kin. While on the first hand this might appear bad, inhuman or simply just not right, that's the way we are and have been for ages.

The classic way of solving these trust issues has been to build fortresses — real or virtual, as a way to restricting the movement of the party suspected to be malicious. This has been a backbone of all things security — doors, locks, safes and later on, cryptography, two-factor authentication and biometric scans. It would hence be not very off to say that a lot of people have been able to make a living simply because humans don't trust each other. Pretty much the entire security economy thrives on our inability to not trust each other. Yet there's a huge sunk cost of broken systems that can't be repaired, and it's quite a lot. The cost of setting up these systems, the cost of data loss in breaches through unreported backdoors, and the research going into building harder-to-crack systems will easily run into billions of dollars of pure sunk cost — money that just can't ever be recovered.

Is there an end to this cat-and-mouse game? Theoretically speaking, no. Even something as amazing as 256-bit encryption can theoretically be cracked, although cracking it well outside the realm of modern computing. But that's not the point.

What I'm trying to say is that if you somehow ditch me into telling you my password and steal my phone, no amount of high-tech security could prevent you from stealing sensitive information from me. No matter how hard colleges tried, students found a way around the anti-cheat systems in exams. Even though banks are constantly evolving themselves on security measures, there's an unprecedented rise in cyber crimes especially among the aged population, which compelled the RBI to campaign to remain safe from such frauds. Technologies by Denuvo made pirating games very difficult, but they were under the radar for destroying gaming performance in most machines. Thus, it would be safe to say that these anti-cheat systems only make cheating difficult, not impossible.

It's like saying a very large number can be considered infinity. That's the typical "engineer" way of looking at things. Any mathematician would tell you infinity is much more than a number — it's an abstraction, a concept which suggests that there lies something beyond the largest number we can ever conceive. In a medical analogy, these are band-aid solutions which don't check in on the root of the problem — why do people don't trust each other.

Also, for quite some time, we've been approaching this trust problem mostly from one angle, while clearly there are two.

Instead of only pulling people out and making it difficult for them to cheat, how about incentivizing people to not cheat and reward them for showing trust? We know that incentives are pretty powerful a force for getting things done, and we've just scratched the surface when it comes to understanding the origins of human behaviour.

Religion does a great job at this. Some villages in South India claim to have an amazingly low crime rate because of well-placed religious incentives. And if Yuval Noah Harari is correct about the modern legislature being yet another sophisticated religion, we might as well improve it to promote trust among each other. That could help a lot with the second part of this trust equation, which I find is often overlooked.

Speaking of cryptocurrencies, security-wise, they're yet another solution in the direction of preventing people from doing bad. But bad guys might as well find a way to game the system (just like what happened with fiat currency) unless we don't use the power of the right incentives.

People should be made aware of win-win games. What cheaters play is a zero-sum game in the short-run (automating spam to jam inboxes and form fields / DDoS attacks), but could even turn out to be lose-lose games in the long run (annoying captchas and stricter forms of security prevention, inconvenience to everyone).

Netflix has done a good job at solving the piracy issue. Do you really want to prevent people from watching pirated movies? How about making movie watching convenient at a small fee?

Spotify did something even better. Want to prevent people downloading free MP3s from shady websites? Own the record-labelling market and buy rights to podcasts and make people believe in the importance of your mission to empower musicians. Provide convenience to the customer at a small fee.

('ll cover more such platforms in detail in a future essay)

While this certainly might be a problem that can't fully be solved. Through one perspective, all that we do, lawfully or unlawfully, is legal in nature. We can do criminal activities because the rules laid out in stone for a land don't apply to its physical nature. In a way, social justice is a shared imagination, and these shared imaginations become the reality of the collective. The only proper "laws" that we have with us are the laws of nature — laws of motion penned down by Newton and Kepler or Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction, and all the other physical laws that we know and which won't deviate by much even if they are challenged. Those natural phenomena will always be there, the way we perceive is all that could change.

Another not-so-widely-spoken law of nature is that human behaviour can be manipulated by the right environment and the right incentives. Product Managers, UX Researchers at companies like Facebook and Instagram, and even traditional salespeople know this well and that's how they're able to convince people into buying things they didn't even need in the first place!

And that's a train of thought on how psychology could help us with cybersecurity. Note that the solution to the problem won't be easy; all that I've tried to do in this article is state the problem and look at another way of solving it. And it goes without saying that the leaps we've made to build trust-less systems such as DeFi will prove very important in developing the social fabric of our society in the years to come. It's just that if we push hard from the other side, we can double our speed of progress in the prevention of crime in general.

The problem, thus becomes: how do you incentivize people to be trustworthy?

I was supposed to reach Indiranagar at 8 pm to watch the final we’d all been waiting for so eagerly. But as always, it took a bit longer to get ready and find a cab, which is so typical of me and this city. I was expecting to reach my destination in about 30 minutes. To my dismay, the match had already started and one ball was already bowled. And here I was — stuck in the traffic I’ve grown so used to.

I scrambled to download Hotstar1 from the Play Store on my phone and was pleasantly surprised to see the World Cup being broadcasted for free on the platform. Nice that I won’t have to login with my flatmate’s account to watch the match!

I was carrying with myself my earbuds as usual, thinking I’d wear them on the way. But something clicked and I didn’t take them out at all. The match started, and I turned the volume all the way up.

The cab driver, who must’ve spent dozens of hours this weekend alone on busy Bangalore streets, asked me about the score. All along the way I kept him informed about the boundaries, the disappointing wickets and everything else in between.

He told me very vividly of the Barbados pitch and how should the team slow down till the Powerplay ends so that they put up a competitive total on the board. Even though he wasn’t very fluent in Hindi and I couldn’t converse with him in Kannada, we shared same emotions about the game. I was impressed that he knew so much, and I was again reminded of the connection almost every Indian has with this game.

All across the city, people had geared up for the festivities. We didn’t care about the results as much as being with each other and decorating ourselves in shades of blue, saffron, white and green. You had to stand by your team; not doing so would almost mean a disservice to the nation. Even those people who weren’t interested in watching cricket at all (like my mom) was awake to watch the entire match, despite the starkest difference in timezones. Indians across the world were celebrating in unison, despite the difference in region, religion, age, gender or class.

So much has been talked about the legends who’ve made this win possible. In this post, however, I want to talk about the unsung heroes that make these ethereal experiences possible. Today I want to talk about the very screens that you watched your heroes on. I want to talk about the screens that connect.

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It was Hotstar’s decision of broadcasting the final for free for phones, which allowed us to watch the match from any place of our liking. It was also an amazing tactic for Hotstar’s business to get a load of Free users on the platform and allow them to use the app on the phone.

Hotstar must’ve realized from JioCinema’s mistake of broadcasting the entire FIFA World Cup for free, that you shouldn’t lend out freebies without thinking about how would you retain the new users after the World Cup ends. Choosing to serve the Free version only on the mobile app also allowed them to do the following:

1. Market their new shows/movies during the ads. People interested in watching those shows would convert to being paid users.2

2. People keep their phones closer to them and they need to install an app to watch the Live broadcast for free. This allows Hotstar to serve push notifications straight to the devices of consumers who unlock their phones around 80-100 times a day3

3. Reducing cost by limiting “free hoarders” like myself to the Mobile app allowed them to at least save resources by charging other “big screens” TV and PC. Even the mobile web site wasn’t serving the livestream for free, which meant that users were “forced” to install the app and that brings us back to point #2

To ensure that you are served all the 1920x1080 pixels throughout the match is no easy task. Especially if you consider that:

1. A lot of Premium users were getting the stream at 4K resolution and Dolby Atmos sound

2. The match commentary was being served across different languages at once

3. There were some matches running in parallel during the group stages

4. A staggering 5.3 Crore devices (53 Mn for my buddies overseas) were viewing the match on Hotstar all at once during the day of the final!

How these streaming services work from the background is not as simple as it seems. Engineers work hard to optimize how these streaming platforms are “structured” and introduce changes to balance the cost borne by the company to run the platform, and at the same time, make it scalable enough for everyone to use it without hiccups. This art and science of balancing cost with scalability is called “system design” and is a pretty fascinating topic.

A system that doesn’t scale well ends up being like one of those government websites which are supposed to show the Class XII board results — the only difference being that they’re not able to show them!

Since a lot of people would be flocking to each other’s houses to watch the match, which meant that these folks couldn’t contend with smaller screens. They had to switch over to a bigger screens to watch the match. This meant that the hosts had to pay.

There’s also something that was at play here — I’d call it the ‘party effect’.4

If you have already spent a lot of time and money hosting a party, you won’t think twice about re-ordering food and drinks, since you’ve already put so much money and effort into things. A few other examples:

• If you’re spending ₹350 on a Starbucks coffee, you’d be more likely to spend ₹60 for that extra cream up on top

• You’re out with your girlfriend watching Inside Out 2. Suddenly, you feel okay ordering PVR’s overpriced popcorn because you’ve spent a lot of money getting the ticket for Director’s Cut already.5

Likewise, if you’re already spending the time and effort to call people up, ordering food and drinks and buying fake World Cup kits from Commercial Street, you’d be okay spending ₹100/month for a Hotstar subscription.

So, ‘nudging’ people to come together to watch the match is not only good for the people watching, but also good for Hotstar’s business. After all, these platforms spend dozens of crores of rupees to get exclusive broadcasting rights, and they need to justify that bet by making users spend on them.

TBH, I’d call it good business. After all, it’s making people come closer. If you couldn't afford it, you had a way to watch the match, that too “legally.”

I hope some of these streaming services actually partner up with physical spaces where people come together to watch sporting events. 🤞

And that’s what I love about sports in general. It bonds people despite differences. Cricket could be one of the single biggest contributors to the unity of this nation which witnesses thousands of regional, linguistic and religious divisions otherwise.

When India lifted the trophy, everyone at Nevermind6 (the place I went to) hugged everyone. The bartenders poured drinks from up top directly for people to chug. Nobody cared if you’re rich, pretty, religious or smart. People roamed about in bikes on the slim BLR streets late in the night and held the Indian flag up high. 🇮🇳

I still remember where exactly I was at the time of the 2007 and 2011 World Cups. Likewise, I’ll always remember that fine night when Pandya bowled the last ball of that splendid over.

If you’re having trouble figuring out who was the best performer of the match of them all, I’d urge you to take your phone out of your pockets, and remember those hundreds of brilliant engineers who have helped deliver that action right back at you.

From huddling around radios for AM commentary; to the boxy, remoteless TVs when the Asiads were first broadcasted in colour by DD in 1982; to watching the match at the comfort of your own hostel rooms through pirated streaming services, we’ve come a long way :’)

These are technologies which allowed us all to come together and celebrate something that was happening literally at the opposite end of the globe. I know it sounds quite normal but just think about how cool that is!

I’m thankful to the Indian Cricket Team who healed us all through these moments. But I’ll also be thankful to those screens that connect us and help us get closer together as a nation.

Now, let me get back to the repeat telecasts of watching the team lift the trophy in Barbados and Mumbai for the 18934387th time. After which I’ll open the highlights for the Euro and Copa America finals. And not to forget the Hungarian GP. Olympics are also just around the corner, let’s see how that goes.

This year is a pretty eventful one for sports fans of all kinds. In other words…

“Crazy.”

— all my friends these days 😖

What’s your name, BTW?

Shikhar? Are you into sports?
Amulya? Are you a pretty girl?
Lavanya? Can you count in Hindi till 30?
Irfan? Do you hate Modi?

It’s very easy to judge (or misjudge) someone merely on their outer identity, the name of the wrapper. Maybe that’s why I wanted to keep the identity of this newsletter a little ambiguous and interesting.

Introducing Masala Dew!

I could’ve used my name and continued writing on my website. I could’ve asked ChatGPT for name suggestions (tbh, I did) but the suggestions made me yawn half of the time and cringe for the rest of it.

In fact, I’ve been running circles around this problem since 2020, and I couldn’t ever come up with a satisfying answer. I told my friends that I’m working on this unnamed “project” and will share it with the world soon. But none of my 100+ shelved drafts saw the light of the day.

Recently, I read a couple of Austin Kleon’s books, namely — Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist. I thought hard about it and realized that I was putting off the naamkaran of this newsletter just to procrastinate.

I needed some time. Any post that I’d put out about the things I was interested in, might make me look like an imposter (or that’s how I felt). I was figuring out my career path and my strengths. Unfortunately, core engineering probably wasn’t one of those things.

What I knew for sure was that I wanted to stay close to tech but also to the people who are affected by it. I thought product management fit that problem statement better than a traditional engineering role, as it answers the “why” questions much better than the “how” ones.

Now that it’s been two years into my role as an APM at Atlassian, I think I’m ready. I’ve been “beta-testing” my work by sharing on my own domain and assessing engagement. But before starting this newsletter, I had two apprehensions in mind.

1. What if I run out of things to say?

2. What if my friends mock me for posting my thoughts online?

I resolved these questions in the following way. This helped me move forward.

1. I’ll run out when I will. There’s no point in overthinking about it right now.

2. This one’s purely experiential: The people who read my work usually like it. The ones who don’t read: well, they don’t even give a shit.

Now, all that out of the way, what is this newsletter even about?

• Masala Dew is a popular beverage served at the amazing Sky Labs on the BITS Pilani campus. Thinking about that glass of Masala Dew on a hot summer afternoon brings back a lot of good memories.

• It has a desi component to it and is also kinda cool if you ask me.

• However, this newsletter is not about Masalas or Mountain Dews. For now, it’s mostly around technology and it’s implications on our culture mostly in India. Sometimes it’s about things outside of India too, but my country remains my primary frame of reference.

• I’ll put some emphasis on brevity. I’ve gotten reviews that my writing is a bit too long and windy at times, and I’ll try to make it so short that you’ll be done reading one edition as you slowly sip your glass of Masala Dew.

Honestly, I don’t know what all I’m gonna post here, since tech touches all the big and small aspects of our everyday lives. I’m a bit inclined towards tech and have always been: for that’s what I do for a living.

I’m open to see it evolve into something niche and but still cool enough to read. Even though I mostly deal with software these days, I still have an active interest in how the hardware/deep-tech space is evolving in India. I’ll take the liberty to write on all of these things on this platform.

Think of this as an Indian version of Stratechery meets Wait But Why but really really dumbed down, nostalgic, nerdy and desi. I honestly can’t pretend to know a lot, because I don’t. I hope this also makes me read all the sources that I’d refer just so that I don’t look like an imposter.

Whatever it ends up becoming, my primary aim is to make every edition both entertaining and insightful. And personal, opinionated, slightly funny. Basically, something that makes me look cool among my Gen-Z brethren.

Substack is getting more vivid day after day with a lot of cool writers flocking to it. I’m interested to see how this space evolves in the coming few months/years and will post something about this very soon.

I’ll try to post at least one a month, for at least a year. This should give me about 12 posts by the end of June 2025. That should be good enough for me to understand how good am I at this Substack-thingy.

Thanks for sticking around.

Bonus content:

What’s In A Name is this hip karaoke bar in Koramangala, Bangalore. Not too shabby if it’s your first experience at a karaoke bar. You basically get drunk and sing your heart out. But there’s always this chance of getting too far and bleating like a goat if you’ve had too many kamikazes. That’s not recommended.