PrathamDev @prathamdev

For 12 years, they stayed secular and liberal. They didn’t succumb to propaganda or the greed for fame and power. And they did so while feeling increasingly alone. Everyone knows such people in their social circles, and they deserve to be celebrated now.

If Raghav Chaddha had not jumped ship and moved to BJP, this would have been his moment of lifetime. He could have been the face behind rallying students. But for short term goals, he chose to join the oppressors and now is in hiding

Our CEO read an article in Harvard Business Review about digital transformation and panicked. He told me we needed to modernize our tech stack or risk obsolescence. We sell industrial lubricants. Our tech stack is perfectly fine. But you don't tell a CEO that his HBR article is wrong. You tell him he's a visionary and then you spend company money to prove it. He asked me to hire a tier 1 consulting firm to audit our entire infrastructure. I signed a $600K contract with a massive global consulting agency. They sent over a team of six 23-year-olds wearing matching fleece vests. These kids had degrees in organizational psychology and absolutely no idea how a server works. They set up a war room in our main conference center. For 3 months, they interviewed my department about our agile workflows. I don't have an agile workflow. I have a series of bash scripts from 2008 that run automatically at midnight. When they asked to see my architecture diagrams, I drew a circle on a whiteboard. I told them we operate on a decentralized monolithic closed-loop ecosystem. I used the word ecosystem 14 times in a single hour. The lead consultant furiously typed everything I said into his iPad. I spent the next 12 weeks napping in my massage chair while they analyzed our pipeline. Yesterday, they presented their final findings to the executive board. They delivered a 150-page slide deck. The first 149 pages were just bar charts showing how much data we process. The final page was their strategic recommendation. They recommended that we maintain our current closed-loop ecosystem because it represents peak structural integrity. They literally charged us $600K to tell the CEO that my 2008 bash scripts are state-of-the-art. The CEO was thrilled. He thanked me for building such a robust foundation. He gave me a $35K performance bonus for passing the audit with zero critical vulnerabilities. Consulting is just paying someone else a fortune to take the blame or confirm your bias. I'm taking my bonus and buying a vintage 1980s arcade cabinet for my living room.

Intangles youtube.com/@intangles?si=… via @YouTube Truck Drivers Playlist, Made By Truck Drivers of India. #Songsofthehighway #journeyplaylist

So let me get this straight.... 1. Agents are about to outnumber humans on the internet, so most of the traffic, transactions, and conversations online will soon be machines talking to other machines while we sleep. 2. Superintelligence exists now, and for $20/mo you pretty much get it all. 3. Cloud agents allow you to run a business 24/7 and from literally a phone while you're waiting to order a latte. 4. Voice AI is wide open. This industry has barely changed since the 90s. Infinite opportunities. Voice AI is finally getting good enough. 5. Mobile apps are interesting again for the first time in 10 years, because an AI-first app that thinks and acts on its own is a different species than the passive ones in the store today. There are kids doing $100k/MRR. 6. It's the golden age of open source. The models you download off Hugging Face for free and own forever are landing within months of the ones behind paywalls, so the smartest thing on earth can't be throttled, priced up, or shut off by a company having a bad quarter. 7. The keyboard is on its way out. We spent 40 years learning to type fast, and it's about to feel like handwriting, because soon you just talk and the computer goes and does it. 8. Every company is about to hire agents with their own logins, their own inboxes, their own track records, and a shadow economy is forming where agents pay, hire, and vouch for other agents. 9. Software stopped being something you buy and became something you rent by the hour. The whole industry is repricing from $50 a seat to thousands per outcome. Tons of opportunity. 10. Robots are about to have the moment software agents just had. The intelligence got solved. Now it's dropping into machines with arms and legs, and the people who can wire AI into hardware are about to be the most fought-over hires on earth. 11. The 10-person startup can now out-ship the 500-person company, and everyone can feel it happening. 12. Every white-collar task is getting a "do it for me" button, and most people haven't pressed it yet. 13. Data you've been sitting on for years is suddenly worth something, because now an agent can actually use it. 14. Language stopped being a barrier. Real-time translation that actually works means the next huge consumer app might get built for a market you can't even read, by someone you'll never meet. 15. Every SOP is turning into a product. The way a business does one thing, written down as a markdown file an agent can run, is now something you can sell. Knowledge that used to live in someone's head became downloadable. 16. The moat moved from what you know to how well your business is written down. The company an agent can actually run wins, so being legible beats being big. 17. Since agents will get scammed by other agents, a whole trust layer has to get built. The Yelp for agents. The escrow for machines. Wide open. 18. You keep the whole thing now. A business that needed 50 people to hit $10M needs 3 and some agents, so instead of splitting it 200 ways with investors, it's just yours. 19. Search engines minted a generation of millionaires and billionaires. LLM search is about to do it all over again. Billions of eyeballs are moving off Google and onto ChatGPT, so being the answer inside the models is the new front page. 20. The margins are stupid. You charge someone what they'd pay a human, and it costs you a few bucks in tokens. That gap used to go to payroll. Now it goes to you. Any one of these would DEFINE a decade on its own. We got ALL of them at once, stacked on top of each other in the same 18 months. It's a magical time to be building. You don't need to overthink it. Build.

open.substack.com/pub/5x5yclub/p… Converted @kunalb11’s old podcast with @shaneparrish into a substack. Absolutely loved it.

We hired a new VP of Engineering who is obsessed with agile methodology. He called a meeting on his first day and said we need to transition to 2-week development sprints. He wanted daily stand-ups, retrospective boards, and continuous deployment pipelines. He wanted us to actually write new code. I realized immediately that he was an existential threat to my lifestyle. I let him finish his impassioned speech about workflow velocity. Then I stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and drew a single horizontal line. I told him agile sprints are a localized solution for a localized mindset. I said our infrastructure operates on a Zenith Release Cycle. He asked what a Zenith Release Cycle was. I told him it's a holistic, macro-stabilization framework where we observe the system in a state of prolonged stasis. By not touching the code for 18 months, we allow the legacy dependencies to organically settle. I told him that deploying bi-weekly updates creates micro-abrasions in our database architecture. I used the phrase chronological data scarring. The CEO was in the room and audibly gasped. He told the new VP that we can't risk chronological data scarring just to satisfy a trendy tech buzzword. The VP looked at me like I'd just invented a new color. He was completely paralyzed by the sheer density of my fabricated jargon. He quietly agreed to adopt the Zenith Release Cycle. We're officially scheduled to deploy our next update in the third quarter of 2027. I spent the rest of the afternoon buying things I don't need on Amazon. Agile is a disease invented by people who want to be punished for their salary. I refuse to participate in my own suffering.

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

Hello @grok When will the Mumbai Pune rains stop

India always disappoints you and surprises you at the same time, Even the Middle East Crisis + Ethanol wildcard is now helping this sector Electric scooter demand in India is now 240,000 to 250,000 units a month, that many people want to buy one every single month. But factories can only make about 180,000. That is a gap of 60,000 to 70,000 scooters every month going unmet. Waiting lists have stretched to 45 to 60 days across brands. Ather Hosur plant is running above 90% capacity and had to start limiting which cities get stock. This is the first time in Indian EV history that the bottleneck shifted from demand to supply Running an electric scooter in India costs roughly 20 to 30 paise per kilometer. That means about ₹9 for a 30 km daily ride. Petrol scooter doing the same ride costs around ₹75. Monthly saving works out to roughly ₹2,000. With petrol stuck near ₹100 a liter and West Asia tensions keeping fuel prices high, that cost gap became impossible to ignore. E2W penetration, the share of electric in total two wheeler sales, crossed 10% in June 2026. Eighteen months ago it was under 6% Indian e2W makers are adding over 3 million units of annual factory capacity. Ather is building a new plant in Maharashtra because its Hosur factory is running at over 90% Bajaj pushed Akurdi to 50,000 units a month and is looking for a second site. VinFast from Vietnam is planning a 1 million unit annual scooter line in Tamil Nadu. Delhi just said it will stop registering petrol two wheelers from April 2028. Every new factory going up is a bet that this demand shift does not reverse. Just think about the FY27-Q1 Result, If yu haven't choose right player while yu will get surprise by the result then :)

I have clients living with financial anxiety despite having three times, and in some cases five times or more, the assets I have. And yet I have a sense of having enough, even though I am nowhere near financially free, not even close to Coast FIRE. A big part of the reason lies in the kind of life I have lived so far. I had a negative net worth at age 32, after leaving my job at 26 out of disgust for the life of a salaried employee in an industry I had no talent for. I had no savings when I quit. I tried a business with money borrowed from friends. It was doomed to fail. I was too naive for any business at the time. There were days when I wouldn't even have money to put petrol in my bike. I did not pay the EMIs on two personal loans for 11 straight months. There were months when I would deposit only half the EMI amount at the collection centre because that was all I could manage. I have borrowed money at 10% monthly interest. I even lost my wedding ring to a gold loan. When you have lived through things like this, the amount of money required to give you the feeling of "enough" is significantly lower than the corpus required for FIRE or even Coast FIRE. Another big reason is that I have acquired a skill that is in greater demand than its supply. I know I am one of the better financial planners out there, and I know this skill will continue to improve because my brain is wired for this work and I genuinely enjoy trying to get better at what I do. I have absolutely no emotional need to retire. Maintaining a distance from the adviser community is another reason. I rarely slip into comparison mode. And, truth be told, I do not relate to most advisers. I find many of them too dry. I am happy playing my own game. The feeling of enough has less to do with wealth and more to do with knowing you can survive with what you have even if things go wrong.

@IronyMeter Hahahhaa

Stunning Read

OM Bharatiya @ombharatiya

a month ago

x.com/i/article/2070…

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Un père a dit à son fils : « Tu as obtenu ton diplôme avec mention. Voici une Coccinelle Volkswagen que j’ai achetée il y a de nombreuses années... Il a plus de 50 ans, mais avant de te le donner, emmène-le dans une concession en centre-ville et demande combien ils te proposent. » Le fils est allé chez la concession, est revenu voir son père et a dit : « Ils m’ont proposé 10 000 $ parce que ça a l’air très usé. » Le père a dit : « Emmène-le dans un prêteur sur gages. » Le fils est allé au prêteur sur gages, est revenu et a dit : « Ils ne m’ont offert que 1 000 $ parce qu’ils disent que c’est trop vieux. » Finalement, le père a demandé à son fils d’emmener la voiture dans un club de voitures classiques pour la montrer là-bas. Le fils a pris la voiture jusqu’au club, est revenu et a dit : « Des gens au club m’ont proposé 100 000 $ ! car c’est une voiture très rare et recherchée parmi les membres. » Le père dit à son fils : « Je voulais que tu comprennes que le bon endroit t’apprécie de la bonne manière. S’ils ne te valorisent pas, ne sois pas en colère ; ça veut juste dire que tu n’es pas au bon endroit. Ceux qui connaissent votre valeur sont ceux qui vous apprécient vraiment. Ne reste jamais dans un endroit où ils ne reconnaissent pas ta valeur ! »

India is the absolute first to achieve this and every Indian should be extremely proud of how clever this is. Let me explain what you are even looking at. That video shows a freight train carrying shipping containers stacked two high, one box on top of another, running under live overhead electric wires. Sounds simple. But it is not. No other country in the world has pulled this off. India is the only one. Here is why it is so hard. When you stack two containers on a wagon, the train becomes very tall. Around 7 metres. Normal electric train wires in India sit much lower, around 5.5 metres. So the two cannot share the same track. The train would smash straight into the wire. That leaves you with a choice. Go electric and stack only one container. Or stack two containers and pull the train with a diesel engine. The US, China, Canada and Australia all run double-stack trains. But they mostly do it with diesel, or on routes that were never electrified in the first place. Nobody bothered raising electric wires that high on old tracks. India did both electric and double-stack together. That is the world first. The reason India could do this is a decision from the early 2000s. So, Indian Railways had a basic problem. Goods trains and passenger trains shared the same tracks. Passenger trains always get priority. So freight trains crawled at 25 to 30 km/h. For a growing economy, moving goods that slowly is a major problem. So we built separate tracks only for freight. No passenger trains allowed. These are the Dedicated Freight Corridors. The government approved the project around 2006 and set up a company called DFCCIL to build two corridors. The Western one runs from near Delhi to the port near Mumbai, around 1,500 km. The Eastern one runs from Punjab down to West Bengal, around 1,875 km. Because they were building from zero, the engineers were not stuck with old bridges, old tunnels or old wire heights. They could decide the clearances themselves. So they made a deliberate call to build the whole corridor tall enough for two stacked containers. And electrify it. Then they had to solve two hard problems. First, the wire. On a normal Indian line the wire hangs around 5.5 metres. On the freight corridor they raised it to about 7.5 metres. This is called high-rise OHE. No railway in the world had run a regular freight wire that high before. Second, the engine. If the wire is way up high, a normal loco cannot reach it. The arm on the roof that touches the wire, called the pantograph, would be too short. So India needed a new locomotive. A taller reach. And enough power to drag thousands of tonnes. This is why we built a new loco called the WAG-12. It is a beast. 12,000 horsepower. Double the power of the old WAG-9 it replaced. It can haul trains over 6,000 tonnes, and up to 15,000 tonnes in some setups, at 100 km/h. That is roughly three times the old freight speed. The WAG-12 has its own backstory. In November 2015, Indian Railways signed a deal worth about ₹19,604 crore, around 3.4 billion dollars, with the French company Alstom. They built a new factory in Madhepura, Bihar. Indian Railways holds 26 percent, Alstom holds 74 percent. It was the largest foreign investment ever in Indian Railways. Over time the factory reached close to 90 percent local manufacturing. So most of each loco is now made in India. So, the government approved an infrastructure decision in the mid 2000s, then it got built over almost two decades by DFCCIL, Indian Railways and RDSO. The locomotive came through the Alstom joint venture. The first double-stack train ran under high-rise wires in June 2020, from Palanpur and Botad in Gujarat. The corridor sections were opened in stages after that. And finally, why only India can do this. Three things stack up together. One, broad gauge. India runs on a wider track than most of the world, 1,676 mm. A wider track gives a bigger loading box. So India can run plain flat wagons with two containers on top. Many countries need special low well-cars to manage height, and those still do not fix the wire problem. Two, the fresh corridor. India built new track with no height limits baked in. Old networks in Europe and the US are full of low tunnels and bridges never meant for 7 metre trains. Rebuilding all of that is close to impossible and crazy expensive. Three, the system. The tall wire, the high-reach pantograph and the powerful WAG-12 were all designed to work together as one package. You cannot copy just one piece. You need the whole thing. Put those three together and other railways simply cannot recreate it without rebuilding from scratch. But the part I keep thinking about is that India approved this in 2006 and ran the first train in 2020. Fourteen years. :)

Indian Tech & Infra @IndianTechGuide

2 months ago

🚨 India is the first and only country to operate double- stack container trains with electric locomotives.

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HOEC reported quarterly revenue of MINUS ₹194 crore. Not a typo. Revenue from operations for Q4: ₹(19,428) lakhs. And the part that broke my brains: the same quarter shows a PROFIT of ₹30 crore. Story? HOEC sold its B-80 crude to HPCL earlier in the year and booked 300+ crore of revenue. HPCL didn't pay. The crude never really left either, it sat commingled in HPCL's Mumbai refinery tanks while the two sides fought over the bill. With the dispute unresolved at year end, the sale got reversed in the audited results. So Revenue gets derecognized, hence the negative 194 crore. The money payable to GOI on that sale reverses too. And the crude comes back as inventory, which shows up as a 350 crore credit in "changes in inventory of crude oil." And this inventory is probably a lot more valuable now so the negative revenue has a positive gross margin!!??!! Plenty of companies report losses. Very few report negative revenue. Almost none report negative revenue and a profit in the same quarter.

India’s Trucks Are Connected. The Next Test Is Performance | Autocar Professional autocarpro.in/opinion-column… @intangles

A framework to get you to a 50-100 bagger stock. What it takes: 1. Small/Mid starting market cap - so that there is enough scope for the market cap to expand. 2. Institution worthy but under-owned by institutions - Secular multi year growth catalyst + scope for persistent buying over months and years 3. Neglect (during hold period) - not a mainstream idea - often they don't believe in it till the last one-third phase - ability to hold against consensus is the edge 4. Long Holding period - huge gains are made only if you’re willing to hold the positions for years and decades and have an aversion to selling or booking profits. 5. Drawdown - methodology to ignore 50-90% drawdowns. I don’t say ability to stomach as one can’t really stomach it. It essentially comes down to not even looking at it or avoiding calculating your returns or drawdowns. Vision helps (covered below). 6. Allocation - Just the right starting allocation (typically small enough) that you never feel the pinch even if it goes wrong and you can continue to hold on for as long as it takes 7. Vision - to see the big picture and the larger trend and not be bothered by events in the interim. This in no way means one should follow this approach - there are many ways to make it work in the markets - but just to understand that this is what it takes.

Bombay Dyeing has a market cap of around Rs 2,300 crore. The company is sitting on approximately Rs 1,400 crore in cash and fixed deposits. Just the ongoing Three ICC luxury tower in Dadar has a revenue potential of Rs 6,500 crore. The realization from a single scheme in Dadar is nearly 3x the entire market cap, and margins could be 50%+. Think about that for a second. This is a Wadia Group company. One of the oldest business houses in India. The textile business is what people associate with the name but that is not where the value is. The value is in the land. Prime Mumbai land. And nobody is pricing it correctly. Bombay Realty, the real estate arm, has two flagship developments in the heart of Mumbai. Island City Centre at Dadar and Wadia International Centre at Worli. The Dadar land parcel alone has a total development potential of 30-35 lakh square feet. At current Mumbai luxury pricing of Rs 50,000-55,000 per square foot, you are looking at Rs 15,000 crore of gross development value. From one location. They already sold 22 acres at Worli to Sumitomo Realty for Rs 5,200 crore. That cash came in, debt got wiped out, and the balance sheet is now essentially debt-free. Debt-to-equity is 0.1%. The company has more cash than total debt. That Worli monetization alone was more than double the current market cap. And they still have land left. As per management interview, they have 800+ Acres (BD + Wadia Group) of land across India, out of that 80 + in Mumbai. Plus the massive Dadar development that is just getting started with Three ICC. The core textile and polyester business is struggling. FY26 revenue fell 9% to Rs 1,460 crore. Full year PAT collapsed 94% to Rs 27 crore. Q4 showed improvement with PAT up 82% but that was driven by other income, not operations. The operating business is fundamentally unprofitable right now. But here is the thing. You are not buying Bombay Dyeing for the textile business. You are buying it for the land bank. The textile business is a legacy cost centre that the market is using to discount the entire company. Strip out the operating losses and just look at what is on the balance sheet. Rs 1,400 crore cash. Zero debt. And land in Dadar and other locations worth multiples of the market cap. If the Wadias decide to go aggressive on real estate development, this company reprices overnight. Even a joint development model where they contribute land and a developer puts in the capital would unlock enormous value. The Three ICC launch is the first real signal that they are getting serious about monetization. The risk is pace. The Wadias have historically been slow to monetize. The textile business continues to bleed cash. And real estate development timelines in Mumbai are unpredictable. If they take another 5-7 years to develop Dadar fully, the value erosion from the textile side could offset some of the land upside. Rumours are the next launch is in Thane. With this they wouldn't just be a one off scheme real estate player. New hires are there. But at Rs 2,300 crore market cap for a debt-free company sitting on Rs 1,300 crore cash with Rs 15,000+ crore of developable real estate in South Mumbai, the risk-reward is heavily skewed in one direction. The market is giving you Mumbai land at a fraction of what any developer would pay for it. Views are personal. For educational purposes only. Not investment advice.

Grabbed coffee with a partner of a 1000cr fund. Was expecting heavy AI talk. Instead we spoke about a bunch of boring businesses he's personally exploring. He spoke about eyeglass boxes, corrugated boxes, eyeglass cleaning clothes and a few more, but here is a short list of what such businesses could be - 1. Eyeglass boxes, cleaning clothes etc for eyewear brands - they don't make it, they need someone to make it. 2. Packaging for fashion brands - again they need someone to make it, fashion is everygrowing 3. Spray pumps and dispensers for cosmetics and D2C beauty - largely imported it seems when it comes to making non simple stuff. 4. Cardboard packaging and corrugated boxes - riding Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, Zepto, all at once. 5. Bottles, bottle caps and closures - ongoing demand from beverage, FMCG, beauty. 6. Hangers, polybags, garment covers for D2C apparel - the entire D2C wave is buying these from someone. 7. Labels and thermal printing rolls - every e-commerce shipment needs them every day. 8. Disposable cups, plates, cutlery for cloud kitchens and food delivery. 9. This one is interesting - cold chain refrigeration units for quick commerce dark stores. 10. Adhesive tapes and branded packing tape - every shipment, every parcel. None of these will make brands, but once you get a recurring contract, very hard to replace you.