Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Getting an American work visa is not exactly easy, as anyone who has applied for an H1B visa knows. A qualification to operate in that field in the US (some are country-specific qualifications, like lawyers and doctors, whereas others are universal qualifications, like engineers), and/or specialized occupations (generally science, tech, or management jobs fill that bill). Then there’s the other side of the story – the company sponsoring the visa (after all, the US government doesn’t fake companies setup as a backdoor for immigration).   What happens then if a Silicon Valley startup founder is a foreigner? With a startup, the company-side criteria is a big problem – the company is barely started! That’s the situation Instagram faced when its founder, Kevin Systrom tried to enlist his Stanford-mate from Brazil, Mike Krieger, write Sarah Frier in her biography of Instagram .   Before we get to how that went, let’s take a detour of how Krieger told his parents in Brazil of...

One view of religions is that they are very good memes, ideas that are very good at spreading themselves. If you agree with this view, then it is correct to conclude that religions should probably be gotten rid of. (Note that in this view, we’re not bothered by what specific harm it causes; rather, the conclusion is drawn as there is no benefit and either a small or a high cost to the host/believer).   But what if that view isn’t right, wonders Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind . What if religions evolved as “cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative”? In this view, the “purpose” of religion was to persuade individuals to be less selfish, to convince them to work as groups with all the associated benefits and sacrifices. The gods “can be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group”. In such a setup: “The gods of larger societies are usually quiet concerned about actions that foment conflict and division ...

Guess which is India’s most valuable unicorn today? It’s the educational app, Byju’s. As Ashish B writes in his biography of the company, COVID-19 helped the company’s growth as online education became common.   The company’s founder, the eponymous Malayalee named Byju Raveendran did his schooling at a government school in Kerala – both his parents were teachers (in Maths and Physics). Rote learning did not appeal to him at all; he preferred to visualize concepts, a technique that would become part of Byju’s teaching system.   He did engineering, not medicine, because only engineering would give the “time to play sports”. Having completed his Mechanical engineering, he started working as a service engineer for a shipping company and got to see the world.   His friends, who were preparing for the IIM (CAT) exams, sought his help with the Maths side of things - He had an aptitude for teaching. In Bangalore, he was soon taking classes for around 40 students. It ...

In The Joy of x , Steven Strogatz talks of something all of us have struggled with in maths: word problems. Translating them into maths equations is quite a challenge for many. Ironic, isn’t it, that kids and parents complain that academics has no connection to the “real world”, but that’s what word problems are…   The root cause of why many struggle with word problems in maths is: “(They involve) thinking not just about numbers, but about relationships between numbers… (and of course) relationships are much more abstract than numbers.” But they still need to be understood, if not mastered: “(Relationships) are also much more powerful. They express the inner logic of the world around us. Cause and effect, supply and demand, input and output, dose and response - all involve pairs of numbers and the relationships between them.”   Calvin, on the other hand, raises a different issue with word problems:   Jokes aside, Calvin’s point is the same as what Keith...

As the DarkNet Diary podcast explained, $81 million dollar had been stolen from the Bangladesh Bank. But how do you cash out that much money? If you just keep transferring it electronically across banks, it leaves a trail. The thieves had planned that out too.   They emptied the accounts in the Philippines almost immediately (almost certainly, someone in Philippines was in on the crime). The money was then taken to casinos in the region, where it was converted into chips. But if you gamble with that much but don’t play for long, it draws attention. The thieves chose a game where one doesn’t lose much, around 10% on average (They were willing to write off the 10% as the cost of doing “business”). Having played long enough to avoid suspicion, they cashed back their chips and walked away. But it’s still a lot of cash. The money trail of subsequent investigations led to Macao, China. But after that, the trail just vanishes.   This seemed to be an exceptionally sophistica...

The joke above reminded me of the Bangladesh Bank heist which was described in this excellent DarkNet Diary podcast . We’ve heard of million-dollar heists in so many Hollywood movies. That’s a lot, but when you go for digital robbery, the sky’s the limit. The amount they tried to rob from the Bangladesh Bank? A billion dollars. No typos, that’s indeed a billion dollars.   You’d rightly be asking the question the podcast asks: “Who would have a billion dollars lying around for someone to grab?” National banks, that’s who (the equivalents of RBI). That’s why the hackers picked the Bangladesh Bank as their target: “The plan was to hack into the Bangladesh Bank and transfer out as much money as they could before anyone could catch them.”   How did they get into the bank’s network? Good old phishing mails (yes, the ones we are warned not to click on) got them in. From that one computer, the hackers hopped around the bank’s network, familiarizing themselves with detai...

As James Metzl wrote in his book, Hacking Darwin , worldover, gene editing is not banned. Or well-regulated. Thus we had China’s He Jiankui announce he had edited the genomes to produce the world’s first such babies. And as later day checks into what had been done showed: “The first application of genetic engineering to future humans was sloppily planned, poorly executed, medically unjustified, secretive, and potentially dangerous.” And UK based scientists declared that they had created the world’s first living organism with an entirely synthetic genome.   Some might ask: “Why wouldn’t we just take the safer route of trusting nature and our own biology – even with all its bugs, shortcomings, and sometimes even dangerous mutations – that’s evolved over billions of years?” The short answer is that nature is red in tooth and claw: “Nature conspired to kill us through hostile weather, predation, starvation, and disease, and we fought back with everything we had… We would ...

  My daughter’s 5 th standard Maths book has a chapter on the metric system: “The metric system of measurement which is used all over the world is based on the multiples of 10.” To recap what you learnt at school, Kilo is 1,000; Hecto is 100; Deca is 10; Deci is 1/10 th ; Centi is 1/100 th ; and Milli is 1/1,000 th .   The (in)famous exception to the “used all over the world” part of that description is, of course, America.   Remember the term “unicorn” that refers to privately owned startups that are valued at a billion dollars or more? Well, there are enough of them whose value is more than $10 billion. And a few even crossed $100 billion. So new terms were needed for those. By a remarkable coincidence, the “uni” part of “unicorn” means “one”, so the new terms were almost self-evident: ·        Deca corn = a unicorn valued at over $10 billion (but less than $100 billion); ·        Hecto corn ...

The 1997 James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies , starts with a British warship straying into Chinese waters (or did it?) and getting sunk by the Chinese Navy in retaliation. How/why did that happen? Because the master villain had overridden the GPS signal and fed in wrong info instead. The technique is called GPS spoofing. Marc Goodman writes in Future Crimes : “Once again Hollywood was prescient in its vision of future evil.”   Fast forward to 2022. Everyone uses GPS. And in GPS we trust. People have driven into the sea, to the wrong city even because hey, how can GPS be wrong? We tend to dismiss such incidents as stupidity of the driver: how could he not use any common sense?   Increasingly though, all kinds of agencies use tracking devices on their employees, from trucking companies to delivery firms to taxi companies to police departments. Why? To improve their employees’ productivity, and to increase fuel efficiency. But this makes many employees very uncomforta...

We tend to think of China’s economic rise as a relentless one without any road bumps along the way. Until now, that is. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Thomas Orlik in China: the Bubble that Never Pops .   Based on China’s relentless growth starting from 1978: “China’s early reform trajectory appears clear and policy choices consistent.” In reality, the path was bumpy. In the early days, reformers clashed with conservatives within the party. When the reforms worked, the reformers got the upper hand. But when growth slowed, or inflation rose, the conservatives would take back control. When growth stalled again, the reformers would be back. China was oscillating. It was in one such cycle of economic slowdown that things spilled onto the streets, ultimately leading to Tiananmen Square in 1989.   China’s rulers survived that critical moment. And decided that big-bang reforms were dangerous. Slow and steady was the new name of the game. During downturns an...

A short while back, Reliance invested $240 million in the Bangalore based delivery startup, Dunzo. With this, Dunzo’s valuation became $775 million. But what does the term “valuation” mean? It’s the cost of buying the entire company . For companies that are listed (i.e., bought and sold on the stock market), the answer is intuitive: Valuation = Total number of shares x (multiplied by) Share price   But Dunzo is not a listed company (i.e., it can’t be bought/sold in the stock market). How does one value such a company? In such cases, one has to wait for a round of investing to happen. At that point, when someone pays Y amount for a Z% share of the company, you do the maths (if Z% is equal to Y, how much is 100% equal to?) to get the answer. That’s what we saw with Dunzo above.   Since we touched upon billion-dollar valuations for private, startup companies, it brings us to the topic of “unicorns”: “A unicorn company, or unicorn startup, is a private company with a ...

James Metzl’s book, Hacking Darwin , is about genetic editing and the future it is likely to yield. How are things likely to play out as these technologies become more commonplace, affordable and accessible? Yes, there’s the risk of those Frankenstein’s Monsters, but there are other aspects too.   But first, he pokes holes in the “It’s not natural” argument against gene editing: “We have deep seated ideas of what’s natural, but much of it isn’t natural at all… We have been in the business of altering the biological and other systems around us for so long.” How is agriculture natural, he asks. Do crops grow like this left to themselves? And over thousands of years, hasn’t our choice of which plants and crops to grow led to selective breeding of varieties and traits that suit us?   Consider those fatal diseases that kill early that are based on a single gene: “If you could prevent your child from having the disease in the first place (by genetic editing), would you...

In earlier blogs, we looked at some of the problems China is facing (too much debt hidden away; not enough spending). For those, it’s not clear if/what solution their government has in mind.   In this blog, we’ll look at another problem for which China did come up with, partial solutions. It is also revealing in why the details of the Chinese system matter – it creates both problems and solutions, unique to China. Thinking with a Western, or even Indian mindset, causes us to miss them altogether.   The problem are China’s ghost towns – entire buildings of sparkling, new apartments with no buyers; even entire towns built but having no residents! How did that happen? The first time I went to China and heard of this, my opinion was the same as what an American colleague said – Capitalism operates on (perceived) demand; but China isn’t capitalistic. Things are done because the government says so. No wonder they built so many unnecessary things.   Earlier blogs in ...

As the come-to-school count of students remained low, my 10 yo daughter’s school started combining the sections. Inevitably, the kids have an opinion on the move. Unsurprisingly, it’s not a positive one. My daughter, for example, attributes this change to a different reason: “My teachers are too lazy to come to our class, so she makes us lug our heavy bags around.” To which I responded: “Given how useless all of you are, you’ll all grow up to become coolies. Consider this as practice for that.” She wasn’t amused. On the other hand, combining sections means one might bump into old friends. One boy went up to his “childhood friend” (that means they knew each other in Nursery) with a hearty “Hey there!” and a thump on the back. The Childhood Friend looked at him weirdly and asked: “Who are you?” Ouch! Of course, my daughter found this humiliation hilarious.   But as Shah Rukh Khan said, “Picture  abhi   baaki hai, mere dost ” . Or we could tweak S...

  Our credit card details get stored in more and more places (digital and physical). And periodically we hear of hackings e.g. Domino’s India (1 million card details) and Marriott hotel (exposed 500 million guest records worldwide). But what alternative do we have? In theory, we could key in the card details for each transaction (and turn off the “save card details” option), but that’s too painful…   In India, the RBI has come up with a solution - “tokenization” . Setting aside the delay (from 1-Jan to 30-Jun), let’s look at what tokenization means, and how it would help with the data hacks risk.   Here is how tokenization would work: You install the app for the site e.g. Amazon, Myntra, whatever. When it comes to making the payment, you do not enter your card details. Instead, when you click the payment button, the app places a request to the credit card company (VISA, MasterCard etc) to initiate the payment. The card company then generates a one-time, uniqu...