Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Rahul Matthan wrote about his experience with the Digi Yatra app, the Indian government’s “biometric access system for air travel”. Privacy advocates were up in arms about the app, but that’s exactly what drove him to try it: “I strongly believe that no matter how repugnant a technology might sound at first blush, I need to try it out myself before forming a firm opinion.”   The app takes a photo of you – that pic is used to identify you at the airport, so “make sure it is clear and well lit”. Then you add your identity information to the app. Or if you already have the (government issued) DigiLocker app with the Aadhar ID fed into it, just link the apps and authorize the transfer of the Aadhar info. That’s it, as far as the setup is concerned.   Before the trip, enter the details of your flight. Or just scan the QR code on the boarding pass. At this point, your face biometrics and the flight info are uploaded onto the airport's Biometric Boarding Processing System ...

Framing good laws is very hard. Partly because a law is framed based on a particular need of a particular time, based on what the legislators can visualize. But once the law is framed, times change and unforeseen use cases arise. Or just as likely, people find a way to subvert the law by going by the letter, not the spirit.   Take the money bill topic. There’s a lot of criticism that the BJP government classifies all kinds of bills (including non-money bills) as money bills, i.e., related to finances. Why? Because a money bill only needs Lok Sabha approval, where the BJP has the numbers. Whereas a non-money bill requires both houses to approve, and the BJP lacks the numbers in the Rajya Sabha.   Ever wondered why the concept of money bills even exists? It is because we copied our constitution from the British. And why did the British have this concept, when so many democracies like the US don’t? Alok Prasanna Kumar explains . In UK, there was a constitutional crisis in...

As Tesla launched its car models, a pattern emerged, writes Tim Higgins. “The juxtaposition of praise and doomsaying would become a hallmark of publicity for Tesla for years to come.” The praise was for the cars. The doomsaying was about the financial prospects of the company itself.   Elon Musk had to manage this contradiction throughout the company’s history. The danger that the predictions of bankruptcy would become a self-fulfilling prophecy was all too real. One way Musk handled the situation? “People at this point ought to be a little more optimistic about the future of Tesla because we’ve confounded the critics at every turn so at a certain point people have to get tired of being wrong”, Musk said with his typical bombast.”   Confidence, bordering on asking for the impossible, became Musk’s style: “Announce something, then figure out how to make it happen.”   Musk is/was also the master of selling a dream. He also owned SpaceX, the rocket compa...

Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence describes the dangers of AI, and some ideas on how it could be prevented from going rogue. Though, he wasn’t too optimistic such checks would work – the AI would become way, way smarter than us, he felt, because of its “self-improvement” capabilities.   I read his book almost a decade back, and back then (remember this was long before the likes of ChatGPT), I felt some of his concerns didn’t sound realistic. Assume the check to prevent an AI from going rogue is to put it on an isolated computer, i.e., a non-networked computer. Bostrom warned such a restraint would not work: “It (AI) may use its social manipulation superpower to persuade the gatekeepers to let it gain access to an Internet port.” C’mon, I thought, that sounds like a movie scenario.   A few days back, I realized Bostrom was right.   Let’s start with CAPTCHA’s. What’s that? They are those images you get on many websites on the login page. The site asks you to...

When Tesla started off, there were no battery manufacturers who had either the reliability or the volumes (quantity) needed for a niche electric car wannabe (like Tesla), let alone one with mass market ambitions (delusions?). The supply chain then was yet another challenge Tesla faced, writes Tim Higgins.   Early on, one of its lithium-ion battery suppliers, LG Chem, sent it a letter with a dire demand: Return our batteries. Why? There had been several high profile issues with lithium-ion batteries – one incident involved a fire on a cargo plane (a different manufacturer); another was Apple’s recall of 150,000 laptops (batteries by LG Chem). After those incidents, LG Chem’s legal department was worried that the any fire in a car would bring lawsuits on LG Chem as well.   Tesla’s assumption that it would create the market and therefore new battery suppliers would join in was proving to be wrong. The reason for the lack of interest was the same as LG Chem – the fear o...

Based on my 11 yo daughter’s ICSE books, I feel they are far better for learning than the CBSE ones I grew up on. The science books, for one, will describe easy-to-understand experiments to prove various concepts. I guess this model works, because I find my daughter will have (surprisingly sensible) queries on some of those experiments.   ~~ Like the Chemistry chapter on the states of matter. To prove gases can be compressed, it asked to take a toy injection. Seal the nozzle, it said. There’s still some air in the injection. Press the plunger down next, it said. Since the plunger went down and the air had nowhere to go, it proves that the air must have gotten compressed, it concluded.   The same chapter had a less satisfactory experiment to prove that gases occupy space. Invert a glass into a trough of water, it said. The water rises up into the glass, but only up to a point. Why only till that point? Because the air above it occupies space (and prevents the water fr...

Car companies sell their vehicles through dealers. Elon Musk though decided the best way was for Tesla to sell the car directly, writes Tim Higgins . But this brought the company into “unchartered territory” – in most American states, car companies are not allowed to sell directly to customers!   Given that Tesla had enough challenges – building a car company from scratch, not just another car but an electric one, and the need for huge cash investments – why was Musk trying to create one more challenge for the company? Well, Musk ideologically hated the “hard sell” approach – coming from the Internet age, he felt a great product would sell itself. In addition, Musk understood that buyers would need to be educated about electric cars – and for that, he didn’t trust the dealerships; instead, Tesla should build its own sales team. And yet: “He tended to show little interest in the boring nuts and bolts of sales operations.” This is just one of many contradictory stances Musk...

All attempts to get my 11 yo daughter to indicate which profession would interest her get us nowhere – “I am too young to think about such things”, she will announce very sagely. Such wisdom is reserved only for such occasions, sadly.   If she won’t pick one, we’ll pick one for her, we decided like true blood Indian parents. And our pick is engineering. Obviously. No, not just because both of us are engineers. The pay for engineers on average is between decent to good. Engineering courses are cheaper than almost all other professional courses. Engineering degrees are valid across the globe, unlike say medical or law degrees. And the world will always need engineers.   Of course, once you start on the engineering path, the goal becomes IIT for all Indians. At which our daughter would shrug, “What is IIT? What makes it so great?”. Obviously, she’s too young to understand that.   My wife tries explaining to her that the branded colleges get you jobs on campus, wh...

Building a car company takes enormous money. When Elon Musk invested in it, it was just an idea of its founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk (correctly) told them that their estimates of how much money was needed to launch their first car was too low. But even Musk’s estimate, while higher, would still prove way too low, writes Tim Higgins .   Musk comes from a Silicon Valley background and mindset. He just assumed venture capitalists (VC’s) would invest in the company. Wrong! They were used to risking smaller amounts in startups that could launch a product quickly – in other words, VC’s only invested in software companies: “A car company just wasn’t something most investors were conditioned to consider.”   When Tesla just had a working prototype of its sports car, the Roadster, Musk being Musk, decided to show it off, let people take a test drive. The pickup was awesome, the experience great. Folks who assumed an electric car would be worse in perform...

There’s a popular belief that we use only 10% of our brain capacity. This belief, as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla point out, has become the “staple of advertisements, self-help books, and comedy routines”.   The authors tear into this belief. First, there’s no known way to measure the brain’s “capacity”. Conversely, we don’t have any techniques to measure what fraction is actually used by any individual. Second, it’s a fact that if parts of the brain tissues don’t show any activity for extended periods of time, then they die. Till date, we haven’t found or seen any way in which such dead tissues ever getting revived. How then, if that 90% hasn’t been used all your life, would you even resuscitate it? Lastly, the brain consumes a huge amount of the energy we produce/consume, and it needs a lot of oxygen. If most of that brain is non-functional, then evolution would have chipped away at its size by now. After all, wastefulness aside, the size of our human brains causes o...

Tesla, the electric car company. It was founded in 2003 and named after the inventor, Nikola Tesla. In 2004, Elon Musk became its biggest investor. As the company’s ambitions grew, Musk would take over. In 2006, he published the company’s “secret master plan” in a company-wide blog: “ In short, the master plan is: 1) Build sports car 2) Use that money to build an affordable car 3) Use  that  money to build an even more affordable car 4) While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options Don't tell anyone.”   As I read Tim Higgins’ wonderful biography of the company, I think this can be the 0ne-line summary of the book: Tesla executed that “secret master plan”.   In his typical bombastic style, Musk claimed that the intent of the company was to “help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy”. Why then start with a sports car, you ask (Step 1 of the secret master plan ...

During our vacation in Singapore at the end of last year, I saw this banner for UPI based payment systems in their subway: I guess that banner was a bit premature. After all, the linkage of UPI with Singapore’s PayNow happened only recently - It allows for real-time payments and reduces the transaction costs with existing methods of money transfer between the two countries.   Next up in the line for UPI integration are UAE, Indonesia, and Mauritius.   ~~   Back home in India, while Indians can use UPI for payments, foreigners visiting India can’t. Until recently, that is. For travellers from the G-20 countries (the 20 biggest economies in the world), India has now made UPI a possibility . Visitors from those countries can apply for PPI wallets (Prepaid Payment Instruments) at the airport (only Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore for now), and then they too can “enjoy the convenience of UPI payments at over five crore merchant outlets across the country that accept...

I saw two snippets in different articles about different aspects of ChatGPT, and both were quite thought-provoking.   Tyler Cowen points to this link on how the same characteristics of the AI chatbot can be good for some fields, but not-so-great attributes in other fields. The study in question found its tone to be more neutral than that of most humans, and it focused on facts. People in the areas of finance and psychology tend to find it to be “more useful than humans”. On the flip side though, that very attribute makes ChatGPT unattractive to those in the medical domain. Why? Because they feel it gives too much information but “not enough simple instructions”. If true, this would suggest ChatGPT is a great tool to collect the facts (though I’ve also seen articles that accuse ChatGPT of being a bit too left leaning!) but not so useful in decision making advice…   The other one was this book recommendation site that asked ChatGPT to recommend the best books on the topi...

As I was reading this Hourly History book on the Crimean War , I was struck by several of the similarities with the Ukraine war. Specifically: “The war did not produce a great victory or a huge defeat for any of the countries involved.”   The Crimean war involved 4 empires: France, Britain, Russia, and the Ottomans. It started off because the Ottoman empire was stagnating, far behind Europe in science and technology, including military technology.   When Russia decided to expand, its obvious target was thus the Ottoman empire, whom they called the “sick man of Europe”. While the other empires didn’t have any love for the Ottomans, they were also clear that a Russian incursion into Europe was dangerous for them. Russia, after all, had the largest military force. And so Britain and France, eternal enemies, decided to ally against Russia to protect the Ottomans.   An early end to the war might have been possible, but by then, public opinion in both France and B...