Marseille city hall has fallen & they have put up Palestinian flags inside

Real life, baby

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My conversation with Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct. Noah is building a personal AI assistant. It's still invite only, has spent nothing on marketing, and is growing roughly 10% A DAY. This is his first long conversation about the company. We discuss: - Why Instinct doesn't have an app - Buying compute months ahead of exponential demand - How users learn to trust it with a credit card - Safety and security - Agents coordinating with other people's agents - Instinct's business model - Apps built on consumer inertia - and more Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:11 What people are using AI agents for 15:07 Rethinking travel, reservations, and the internet 22:43 Trust, privacy, and personal data 27:50 The business model behind Instinct 38:04 How existing businesses will adapt 47:55 Designing a personal assistant people love 53:15 Growth, compute, and competing with Big Tech 1:11:44 What’s next for Instinct and personal AI

I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents… optimizing entirely for the outcome and forgetting that, for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of experience. Travel is the obvious example. People will almost always never want “book me a trip.” They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends, and eventually book. And the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think. That’s why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category.

I don't belong to the school of thought that predicts doom because of AI-induced job losses. But suppose that prophecy does come true. Would that be the end of the road for the Indian middle class? No. I believe India has a great hedge available: Tourism. The Government of India should embark on a massive tourism infrastructure mission that can keep the economy running even if the IT industry gets severely disrupted by AI. India may not be the world's greatest innovator. We may not lead the world in cutting-edge R&D. But India has something that nobody can manufacture. We are a subcontinent blessed with extraordinary natural and cultural diversity. Snow-covered mountains. Deserts. Pristine hill stations. Serene beaches. Palaces. Forts. Backwaters. Wildlife. And 1,500-year-old temples that are architectural marvels. We have thousands of years of history and civilisation waiting to be showcased to the world. If AI really does wreak havoc on employment, it is likely to play out over the next 3–5 years. Why not prepare now? The government could temporarily relax the fiscal-deficit target by, say, 3% of GDP and deploy that money on a war footing to completely transform infrastructure around India's major tourism destinations. World-class roads. Clean cities. Airports and railway connectivity. Public toilets. Signage. Last-mile transport. Heritage conservation. Safety. Digital infrastructure. Waste management. Make India's tourism destinations genuinely world class. Then market them aggressively to the world. Millions of additional international tourists could come to India. And unlike many capital-intensive industries, tourism has an enormous employment multiplier. A person doesn't need an advanced degree to participate in this economy. The millions who may lose jobs in low-end IT/BPO roles could be retrained for front-end hospitality and customer-facing roles. English-speaking BPO employees can become hotel and travel professionals. IT salespeople can reinvent themselves as tourist guides, destination specialists and experience managers. People with entrepreneurial instincts can build tourism agencies offering end-to-end solutions. Those with capital can build world-class hotels, resorts and tourism infrastructure. And an enormous ecosystem gets created around them: Drivers. Planners. Guides. Servers. Receptionists. Housekeepers. Cleaners. Cooks. Shopkeepers. Photographers. Local artisans. Travel operators. The employment potential is enormous. And there is a second-order benefit. Our towns themselves will become better. Remember what happened when Xi Jinping visited Mamallapuram. The place was transformed almost overnight. Unfortunately, much of that focus disappeared after the visit. But it proved something important: When there is political will and a compelling reason, India can transform a place remarkably quickly. If AI eventually disrupts one of our biggest employment engines, necessity itself can become that reason. We need another engine of growth. Given India's limitations in innovation and R&D, I believe tourism is one of the biggest opportunities sitting right in front of us. And there is one thing AI cannot easily replicate. The feeling when you stand inside the Mysore Palace. The adrenaline of white-water rafting in Rishikesh. The awe of looking at the Brihadeeswara Temple. The silence of the Himalayas. The serenity of a Goa beach. The experience of walking through an ancient temple town. A machine can show you a picture. It cannot give you the experience of being there. India has it all. Let's build the infrastructure, market it to the world and turn tourism into a massive employment engine. If AI is going to change the world, India should not wait for the disruption. We should build our hedge now. Tourism. On war footing. Let's grow. @narendramodi

536,000+ views on Instagram. Maybe it resonated because family vacations have quietly become another project to manage—flights, itineraries, kids, logistics, expectations. We spend months waiting for a vacation… and sometimes come back needing another one.

We have a bookshelf in the office. People who visit us sometimes pick up a book from there as a conversation starter: "Fascinating title - what did you think of it?". What they don't know is that it is a reject pile. Any book we like, we take home. What's left there are the books nobody wanted to read.

This is the fundamental human conceit - one that most religions challenge but don't go far enough. We can clearly see that the square and the circle are 2D projections of a 3D truth. That's because we can perceive 3 dimensions. An ant crawling on the left face can't even perceive the third dimension, so it will consider the square not only to be the truth but in fact the _whole truth_. It is impossible for us to explain the truth to it because, as a two-dimensional being, it has no conception of a cylinder. But what if the cylinder itself is a projection of a four-dimensional object that WE can't perceive? The probability, however small, is never zero. Not only is that truth unknown, it is _unknowable_. If by science, magic or religion, we get a glimpse of the fourth dimension, do we now know the truth? No, because that itself could be a projection of a higher dimension. To mix my philosophical metaphors, it's cylinders all the way down. We can't even measure both the position and velocity of an object with absolute precision; knowing the "truth" about anything is not just an uncertainty but an impossibility.

प्रकृति से मिलती नई भारत की रफ्तार, जहाँ भारत की सबसे तेज़ ट्रेनों का सफर हमारे प्राकृतिक परिदृश्यों की शाश्वत सुंदरता से मिलता है। हरे-भरे प्राकृतिक सौंदर्य के बीच से गुजरती वंदे भारत ट्रेन इस बात की खूबसूरत झलक है कि आधुनिक कनेक्टिविटी और प्रकृति किस तरह साथ-साथ आगे बढ़ सकते हैं। #VandeBharat #IndianRailways

*Hotel complimentary breakfast* is the place where a man eats not out of hunger but out of a sense of recovering the room rent. At home two toasts suffice in the morning, but the moment he picks up a plate in the hotel the inner chartered accountant wakes up. First he will put fruit because he has to look healthy, then next to it aloo paratha, idli, poha, sausages and a tiny croissant whose identity he doesn’t know but which is free so it must be respected. As soon as the plate runs out of space he picks up a second plate and tells himself this is only for the omelette. The live-counter guy asks veg or cheese, onion, tomato, chilli, mushroom… now we are not ordering an omelette, we are giving information as detailed as choosing a life partner. Then he puts bread in the toaster. It disappears from the bottom but never comes out. You bend over and peer inside as if a child has fallen into a borewell. Just then someone else’s burnt toast emerges from behind and he looks at you suspiciously as if you did something to his bread. The coffee machine has six buttons. Press espresso and two spoons of sorrow drop into the cup. Press cappuccino and the machine first groans, then releases steam, then gives so much foam that the coffee ends up living somewhere underneath like a tenant. You return to the table and your wife asks “Who will eat so much?” You say “I just took a little,” while looking at the table it seems the United Nations has sent famine-relief supplies. In between the waiter comes to clear plates and you, while saving the half-eaten idli, say “It’s still going on.” Is this a meal or an old EMI that must not be closed? In the end the stomach has already surrendered but the eyes fall on the sweets. We wrap one muffin in a napkin and keep it for later. Then back in the room we cannot lie straight on the bed for two hours and proudly declare “No need for lunch today.” That is the real saving of hotel breakfast: money is saved for one meal and the digestive system does two days of overtime! (From a post of a retired doctor friend.)

JUST IN: Anthropic CEO reportedly increasingly concerned that new hires are working there for a paycheck, as opposed to the company’s mission.

NEW: Cheffy just launched a robot that cracks and cooks your eggs. Egor automates breakfast by cooking eggs 7 ways, while Toastr syncs your toast so everything finishes together. -Automatically cracks eggs with no shells or mess -Cooks eggs 7 ways, from sunny-side up to hard boiled -Makes up to 2 fried eggs or 6 boiled eggs at once -Schedule breakfast ASAP, on a timer, or for a specific time -Steam-finishes over-easy, over-medium, and over-hard eggs without flipping -Toastr syncs toast timing with the eggs Bundle priced at $349.