Ideas We Believe

The journey of Microsoft as a company can be paraphrased into three leaders and their approach to the industry. When bill gates developed a proprietary OS, he knew he had hit the potluck. Over the next few decades, he ensured that the Microsoft ecosystem kept itself updated and remained a close source. Given the philanthropy that Bill is known for, many expected the then-richest man to let go of the closed head and let the CS community have a look at the masterpiece, but Bill's wrath against open source was second to none. He and his successor Steve Balmer would call the open-source OS like Linux cancer. However, at the turn of the millennia, they were hit by rivals like Google in terms of the biggest tech company. Unlike Apple, Bill hadn't been able to trap its customers into an ecosystem. Therefore the battle moved away from OS to browsers, where the once reigning internet explorer faced an upward struggle from two emergent, one which its earlier rival had open-sourced to, an

The rise of Chat GPT gave way to an interesting question, could the machine learning model come to pace with some of the benchmarks of human intelligence today. What followed next was the GPT models facing many management studies and legal tests and doing fairly worse in most. Chat GPT 4 today has increased its likelihood of passing the bar exam from a mere 10% to a whopping 90%. For someone who has seen how these models work, such a jump from one generation to another is no new. But it, therefore, poses more extensive and practical cases for us to implore. Before these large language models took the helm, any legal practice involved the tiresome job of scrounging through numerous precedents and preparing a case for both the defendant and the plaintiff. This involved rigorous search in databases (thanks to the digital revolution) and coming up with critical analysis from the texts. With AI promising to replace this final step in the process, it removes the final bits of human intellige

Faced with the dearth of religiousness, the 21 century has a new guidebook to the purpose of life. A complex interplay of identity and oppression, and revaluation of self as the saviour. From the speaker's perspective, it is a brilliant story of liberation and may have some benign outgrowths like the cancel culture. The first step is identifying the oppression.  The first context in which oppression came into my vocabulary was the freedom struggle from colonisation. Thus a scary picture of pressure is etched into my memory. But, the oppression, like everything else, could be subjective. When I learnt of the hardship of my parent's childhood, I was to believe that I had successfully leapt out of oppression. However, it's clear now that I was a victim of an oppressive third-world system, where my counterparts in more prosperous economies lavishly spent their young years. There is a subjective truth in this. And perhaps masked envy. But what is distinct is that it combines dis

The battle between push and pull is familiar to supply chains. For ages now, industries have produced goods they thought were relevant for the customer and then used networks of distributors and retailers to push these to the consumers. The apparent outcome of this is the massive scale of advertising that uses tactics to lure a customer base for the product.  The shift to a pull-based supply chain seems more rational. One is where the production takes in the customer's demand before the show. Not only does that minimize the risk of product failure, but it also captures the market sentiment with greater accuracy. In other words, it caters to an existing demand rather than creating one for itself. This process is lean and profitable, except for a shortcoming; Production takes time. During the early 90s, when the internet spread like wildfire, people almost immediately expected the internet business to take off. However, it was only after a decade and a massive dot com bubble that tod

Diminishing Sexual Dimorphism and the Non-parental Nature of Human Future The tribe of Hominini dates back to the time when humans were beginning to diverge from apes in the path of evolution. Disocereved in the lands of Hadar (present-day Ethiopia) is a 40 per cent paleontological remains from a young female, affectionately called Lucy .  Unlike other hominids, her relatives were bipeds (walked on two feet). Thus it is the first time the other two of her limbs could have functioned as hands. Although a fully adult (with grown wisdom teeth) she was in no comparison to her male counterparts, who were taller and broad at shoulders. This legacy of lucy is important, as it brings up important discussions to the evolution table. Sexual dimorphism is a noticeable trait in the natural world, the mating call of and the glamourous plumage of the peacock are all elaborate rituals for the male to attract the female. But in humans, we are living in an age where dimorphism is eroding away. The pres