The real stupidity among Indians is to believe that American weaponry can be accessed while retaining an independent purpose for those systems. If a policymaker fails to recognize this or pretends otherwise, that’s a serious problem. So it’s better first to decide what India wants to be — a US lynchpin (if you want to put a positive spin on it) or a great power.

Is this the most important chart in the market? The US accounts for 29% of the world’s consumption while producing 15% of global goods. Meanwhile, China's share of global consumption is 12% while the country accounts for 32% of world goods production. In other words, China’s share of world production is over TWICE as large as the second-largest goods producer, the US. This creates a $1 trillion imbalance between the US and China in terms of global trade, according to Deutsche Bank. We believe the US-China trade war will be long-lived compared to tariffs on Mexico, Canada and the EU. The trade war era has begun.

China was already in more places, doing more things, with more people than USAID could have ever hoped to achieve. PRC's soft power is about enriching targeted leaders, co-opting institutions, making dissidence untenable, and securing resources (just as they have in the US, btw). USAID's soft power increasingly became less about stopping communism and more about spreading progressivism, the doctrine of which is anathema to every country except the gelded West. So by staking out that terrain even as PRC continued its steady march, USAID, State Dept, and other instruments of US soft power managed to erode perceptions of the US' legitimate benefits to erstwhile allies and persuadables at one end while PRC maintained momentum in its own lane of efforts.

This country is silently taking over the world. • 33.2% of global AI breakthroughs • 72-hour standard work weeks • Controls 80% of world critical metals That should terrify you. 11 reasons why the West is losing (& how we MIGHT be able to catch up): 🧵

>co-creator of Unix >creator of B (precursor to C) >co-creator of Go >creator of the first shell >creator of the first text editor (ed) >creator of grep >co-creator of UTF-8 >creator of Plan9 >creator of the first chess engine (Belle) >creator of the first chess endgame tablebases >winner of the Turing Award simply the best programmer that ever lived

I am right now working with extremely capable engineers on some advanced tech and we converse in Tamil because that is what they are most comfortable with. I am (very!) slowly learning Hindi so I can work with engineers in Hindi too. There is a lot of R&D talent in India if we get rid of the English barrier and the social stigma of not knowing English well. As we achieve more, Indians some day will lose this idea that English is a mark of sophistication or achievement. It is a useful language to know but since 95% of Indians are not fluent in English, it cannot and should not be a barrier to advancing in India. The Chinese are a major source of inspiration for me.

Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. The actual model, no distillations, and Q8 quantization for full quality. Total cost, $6,000. All download and part links below: