1. Surviving in Cashless China
This guide to surviving in China’s fully cashless society reads like a sci-fi travelogue. It’s not just that cash is rare; it’s that even bank cards are suspiciously old-fashioned. Everything from renting a bicycle to paying for noodles now runs through tightly integrated ecosystems like WeChat Pay and Alipay, which require Chinese bank accounts, Chinese phone numbers, and government ID.
The real takeaway isn’t about payments though. It’s about infrastructure lock-in. Once you build tightly coupled, end-to-end ecosystems, you don't just shape consumption—you reshape who can participate at all. Access becomes a political decision baked into technical convenience. For India, dreaming of ONDC and UPI 3.0, the message is clear: platforms can liberate markets—or trap them inside opaque gatekeepers.
2. Inner Wilds on Finite and Infinite Ambition
What do you want really? This short but powerful essay argues that much of modern ambition is "finite" - career goals, fame, money - while the kind that makes civilizations (and lives) meaningful is "infinite" - curiosity, exploration, the building of things whose payoff you may never personally see.
This distinction hit hard. In a world increasingly obsessed with scoreboards, infinite ambition feels irrational. But maybe the rationality of infinite games isn't measured in ROI.
"Finite players play within boundaries. Infinite players play with boundaries."
— James Carse
An especially relevant thought for anyone working on things like India's science capacity, AI ecosystems, or democratic resilience - projects that only make sense if you’re willing to be a good ancestor and wait for payoffs that may take decades.
3. Building Effective AI Agents
Anthropic's article on designing AI agents for the real world is the most grounded thing I've read on the topic in months. Instead of vague sci-fi about "AGI," it focuses on the actual messy reality: agents need to deal with inconsistent inputs, partially observable environments, and unexpected failures. Good agents need to be robust, corrigible, and able to gracefully degrade.
4. China’s Overlapping Tech-Industrial Complexes
This deep dive into China’s tech-industrial landscape is one of the best maps of the terrain I’ve seen. China is not building one tech stack, but overlapping, redundant, competing tech stacks in areas like semiconductors, AI, biotech, and energy. Different ministries, SOEs, provinces, and even private giants are all racing in parallel. Some projects will fail. Some will overlap. Some will be wasteful. But redundancy isn't a bug; it's a feature.
It’s a kind of biological model of industrial strategy: lots of mutations, fast replication, ruthless selection.
In India, we often talk about "picking winners." Maybe we should be talking about "generating enough variation" instead.
5. A Startup Founder’s Sixth Failed Attempt—and Why He Still Isn’t a Failure
This story of a founder who failed six times but refused to define himself as a failure is humbling. Not because of the struggle (that’s common enough) but because of the honesty: at some point, you stop being motivated by "winning" and start being motivated by the act of building itself.
It reminded me that Silicon Valley’s real engine isn’t hype or capital. It’s cultural amortization of failure. Failure isn’t fatal because identity isn't tied to outcomes.
If India wants to build a true startup culture, it needs a similar shift. Less hero worship of unicorns, more respect for the sheer stubbornness of builders.
6. The Prophet of Parking: Donald Shoup and Why Parking Shapes Cities
At first glance, writing a manifesto about parking sounds like a cruel academic joke. But Donald Shoup’s work is anything but. His life’s work shows how seemingly boring policy decisions, like how much space cities require for parking, determine everything from urban sprawl to housing affordability to carbon emissions.
A quiet reminder that the small things you regulate casually today become the massive structural bottlenecks of tomorrow.
7. Gwern on Really Trying
One of Gwern’s most personal and profound essays. It dismantles the myth that most failures are due to bad ideas or bad timing. More often, he argues, it is simply not really trying. Because trying, properly understood, is terrifying. It demands giving up plausible deniability. It demands you actually discover whether you are good enough, rather than always being able to say "I could have, if only I tried."
It’s brutal. It’s uncomfortable. And it is also probably the cleanest, simplest explanation for why so many projects, startups, research careers, and ambitions fail silently, with nobody quite noticing.
I have reread this essay several times over the years, and every time it leaves a deeper scar.
Happy reading!