modelthinking

Tuning in to weird signals

In the world of trend research, we are traditionally taught to be on the lookout for ‘weak signals’ - small, low-frequency indicators that hint at a potential shift in culture. And while scanning for these weak signals is a fundamental part of the process, it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of only noticing evidence

On that template, AI looks like it has already finished the first act. The outer ring has cracked: neoclouds, “AI infra” smaller caps, and nuclear or power-adjacent trades are down 50% or more from their highs. That’s your paper-railway phase. The core of the story, Nvidia and a handful of megacaps, is still treated as the “safe” way to own AI, but

But from the perspective of Alibaba and JD, the motivation is broader. Instant delivery is increasingly becoming the way consumers interact with local commerce. If you control the app people open whenever they need something quickly, you control an important part of daily life. That position brings data, merchant relationships, and habit formation

China’s experience also looks very different from India’s because the underlying models are different. In India, quick commerce has largely been built around dark stores — dedicated warehouses holding inventory that can be delivered quickly. The platform controls stock, pricing, and fulfilment, but it also takes on inventory risk and high fixed

Feature engineering is the act of extracting features from raw data and transforming them into formats that are suitable for the machine learning model.

Mastery is about knowing precisely how something is done, having an intuition for the underlying principles, and integrating it into one’s existing web of knowledge. One does not become a master of something by simply reading a book, though a good book can open new doors.

Each piece of data provides a small window into a limited aspect of reality. The collection of all of these observations gives us a picture of the whole. But the picture is messy because it is composed of a thousand little pieces, and there’s always measurement noise and missing pieces.

A couple of years ago, Isaiah Taylor, the founder of nuclear company Valar Atomics, told me something that’s stuck in my head ever since:

There are only really three pillars to anything around us, as far as consumable goods. We've got energy, intelligence, and dexterity .

I would generalize “dexterity” to “action.” Everything we see around us, and

Reading with purpose. For some people, it might sound rigid, but here’s the thing: purpose-driven reading isn’t about forcing structure into something that should be natural. It’s about aligning what we’re reading with what our mind is actually curious about in that moment.