My investment in Divi’s Laboratories has been my biggest missed opportunity. Eight years back—still new to equity investing—I was looking for pharma stocks to invest. During that research—not sure if I should call it research, but let’s go with it—I came across Divi’s Laboratories. I made a small investment in it and forgot about it. In the next 3.5 years the stock went up 5 times! (Figure 1) And I did not make a single new investment during that time! (Figure 2) Every time I thought “it can’t go up any further than that”. Boy was I wrong. So, so wrong!
Arvind Narayanan talking about dividing job into tasks and the boundaries between them.
…if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you’re actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks.
Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people’s jobs that we don’t understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don’t appreciate all the nuances.
If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place. So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation vs augmentation.
My investment in DSP ELSS Tax Saver started as a way for me to save tax. When I started, I had selected two funds for my ELSS investments, the other one being L&T Tax Advantage Fund. Back then the conventional wisdom to save tax was to invest in ELSS rather than PPF for 80C. Especially if you are young and have a long road ahead of you.
I went via the SIP route and my initial three SIPs were in regular plan. After reading a bit more, learning about direct plans and their lower expense ratios I paused the regular plan SIP and moved to a direct plan.
During my initial years the SIP amount was very low. You can see in Figure 1 that the total investment I made in DSP ELSS Tax Saver Fund during FY 2018-19 is just 2.2% of my overall investments. But as I was tracking the performance of DSP ELSS Tax Saver, I realised the fund was significantly outperforming my other investments—both equity and mutual funds. This prompted me to steadily increase my investments year or year. Come every April and I would increased my SIP amount. The percentage didn’t matter. I increased to whatever I thought I could manage for the next one year. I also sprinkled lump sum investments in between my SIPs—sometimes because I had surplus money to invest, others when the markets were in a tizzy due to some or the other global events.
Alexander Kohlhofer quoting Brian Eno and explaining how judgement becomes more important than technical skill in the age of AI.
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.
With Cubase or Photoshop, anybody can actually do anything, and you can make stuff that sounds very much like stuff you’d hear on the radio, or looks very much like anything you see in magazines.
So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they’re prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days, the question then is, “Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do? “
Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.
Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.
It took me a few years to truly grasp the difference. If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.
There is really nothing for me to write about my investment in Dabur. Just like D Mart, the journey has been a painful one. The XIRR (Figure 1) has snaked around the 0% value on the X axis since last six years and as of today it stands at -4.2%. In contrast the Nifty Next 50—of which Dabur is part of—is at an impressive 19.1%. In fact, in the last six years Dabur has unperformed Nifty Next 50 for 5 years.
Jeet Mehta talking about how to keep on publishing even when you have single digit readers. His last suggestion is something he calls it, binge bank.
Your Binge Bank is the collection of content that your future fans will want to consume. It’s the rabbit hole of content they’ll go down. Your audience might not exist now, but when it does in the future (and you can bet it will), they’ll want to go back in time and see everything you’ve produced.
This is why YouTubers with millions of followers have hundreds of thousands of views on their first few videos. Those videos didn’t get any views when they were first published. They were revisited after they became famous, by their most loyal fans.
A rant by a professor posted on Reddit on his struggles with ChatGPT use among students.
I actually get excited when I find typos and grammatical errors in their writing now.
…
My constant struggle is how to convince them that getting an education in the humanities is not about regurgitating ideas/knowledge that already exist. It’s about generating new knowledge, striving for creative insights, and having thoughts that haven’t been had before. I don’t want you to learn facts. I want you to think. To notice. To question. To reconsider. To challenge. Students don’t yet get that ChatGPT only rearranges preexisting ideas, whether they are accurate or not.
Saw this on Hacker News. The discussion on it is also worth reading.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.
Life isn’t fair. But then, each one of us have our own unfair advantage. We just don’t compare our unfair advantage.
Doug Slater talking about input risk when using LLM to code.
An LLM does not challenge a prompt which is leading or whose assumptions are flawed or context is incomplete. Example: An engineer prompts, “Provide a thread-safe list implementation in C#” and receives 200 lines of flawless, correct code. It’s still the wrong answer, because the question should have been, “How can I make this code thread-safe?” and whose answer is “Use System.Collections.Concurrent” and 1 line of code. The LLM is not able to recognize an instance of the XY problem because it was not asked to.
The post covers a lot more ground on the risks involved with LLM generated code. Another thing that caught my attention was:
LLMs accelerates incompetence.
Simon Willison talks about the other side when he says:
LLMs amplify existing expertise
The conclusion is: If you are smart, LLMs can make you—or at least make you sound—smarter. If you are dumb, LLMs will make you dumber, without you ever knowing.
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